


Tell Me Again About the Mountains

by elissastillstands



Series: The Sky Above, the Sea Below [3]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Shenzhou Era, Transporter Malfunction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-13 17:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20586572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elissastillstands/pseuds/elissastillstands
Summary: A transporter malfunction on the Shenzhou. 73 hours, a planet of gold sand, the stories they tell to mark the time.(Takes place in the same universe as "In All Its Grandeur" and "With Wonder in Their Eyes", can be read as a standalone)





	1. How Wide the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [sciencebluefeelings](https://sciencebluefeelings.tumblr.com/) for the [utterly incredible art](https://66.media.tumblr.com/6867a13582b42ebed0a90d5779229a61/tumblr_pxp3lyONVt1yoyhwwo1_540.jpg) and [tincanspaceship](https://tincanspaceship.tumblr.com/) for the beta!
> 
> This was written as part of the [2019 Star Trek Femslash Big Bang.](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/trekfemslashbang) Check out all of the other awesome works in the collection!

_(the amazing cover art by [sciencebluefeelings](https://sciencebluefeelings.tumblr.com/))_

The transporters aren’t working.

Michael suppresses a groan as Ensign Rhys scrolls through his datascreen, reading off statistics about the turbulent radiation interfering with the Shenzhou's systems. “—it’ll be twenty, twenty-two hours until the radiation from the solar storm calms enough for us to beam you up, Captain, maybe more. I’m afraid your mission just turned to an overnight stay on Cygni IV. The radiation storm's messing with our receptors, too, so we won't have any visual signals either—”

Naturally, the Shenzhou’s transporters aren't working when the captain of the vessel, having claimed a case of cabin fever, managed to get herself on the away team and is currently trapped on the planet’s surface. _It’ll be fine, Number One,_ Philippa said. _I just need to stretch my legs, Number One,_ Philippa said. _Don’t be jealous that I got on the away team, Number One. It’s an hour-and-a-half specimen-gathering mission. The weather forecast is still clear. Our transporters haven’t acted up in months._

“Captain? Do you have the requisite supplies for a twenty-four-hour stay on-planet?” Michael cuts across Rhys' report, leaning towards the speaker for the ship’s comm. Her eyes are fixed on the planet below, tracking the billowing veils of yellow-pale sulphur clouds teeming in Cygni IV’s atmosphere and, floating around them all, the faint glittering debris of broken asteroids batted about by the solar storm.

_“Yes, Commander.”_ Philippa’s voice is amused. 

_“We have our full complement of survival gear, Commander Burnham,”_ Ensign Narwani chimes in, her voice crackling over the comm. _“All four of our EV suits are fully functional and at nearly full charge; they’ll last for over two days at current use. We have rations enough for a week and a standard oxygen field generator to use for our base site. We’ll be fine.”_

Michael nods, even though the comms are audio only. “Copied, Ensign.”

_“See, Commander?” _Philippa sounds pleased. _“We have it all under control. One must expect the unexpected on these missions.”_

“I never thought you one to dabble in cliches, Captain.” Michael has to remind herself to measure out her syllables with care, to square up their softened edges with a crisper enunciation. Any attempt at professionalism is inevitably in vain; her relationship with the captain is regarded as somewhere between an open secret and a fact of life by the other crewmembers on the Shenzhou, some of whom take it upon themselves to forward her memos on Earth-based romantic holidays, as if her adolescence on Vulcan had excised all knowledge of human customs she had learned on Doctari Alpha.

Nonetheless, she follows the rituals of discretion to the best of her ability. Part of her insistence on propriety is due to Starfleet’s orders; after the nearly-innumerable meetings and forms and hearings and lectures on _compromise of duty_ and _unprofessional conduct_ from all echelons of the ‘Fleet’s bureaucracy, she has no desire to bring yet more scrutiny on that which is closest to her heart. Part of it is her own disposition for privacy, her determination to set herself and her captain above the tawdry mundanities of captain-first affairs which saturate the ranks of second-rate straight-to-holo romance flicks. Her pride, some might call it. 

The final part is habit, vicious and intractable, grounded in years of being told to keep her chin high, her voice cold, her hands tucked away from the touch of others—the unyielding grip of nurture.

_“Come now, Commander. You know that we humans are predisposed to sentimentality.”_

_We humans_. Once, this phrase would have blown on the embers of old anger, and the older hurts which the anger shielded. Now, Michael allows it, nearly smiling as she pictures her captain’s face shaping the familiar, fond words. 

“I am well aware of your sentimental inclinations, Captain,” Michael says. Though she is trying to cling to professionalism, she adds, almost in spite of herself, “Hence why our transporters are currently unoperational and you are stuck on one of the least hospitable planets in the Alpha quadrant.” 

A wave of suppressed chuckles ripples through the bridge crew. Michael arches an eyebrow in their direction and allows herself the small satisfaction of seeing Detmer and Januzzi coughing into their hands to hide their laughter. The argument between her and Philippa about the Shenzhou’s lateral transporters dates back to Michael’s first contact with the ship and its captain, but it has evolved since then, growing from a terse ideological battle between sentimentality and practicality to—

_Flirting_, Detmer had once called it. _Shameless, shameless flirting. With all due respect, sirs? Get a room._

Philippa’s amusement is audible. _“Be nice to the old girl, Michael.”_

Januzzi and Detmer muffle their laughter again. Michael’s lips twitch as she is forced to admit—though only to herself—the logical basis underlying Detmer’s less-than-poetic description. “I shall endeavor to do so, Captain. And if that’s all, your next check-in will be at 2100 Standard hours.”

_“Noted.” _Michael can hear the smile in Philippa’s voice through the crackle of static, and she can no longer contain hers. _“Commander Burnham, you’re acting Captain while I’m on-planet.”_

“Yes, Captain.”

_“Take care of our ship, Number One.”_

“I will, Captain,” Michael promises. 

She cannot help the earnestness of her reply, and tries not to flush when she sees the entirety of the bridge crew staring at her with soft, fond grins. Michael clears her throat. “This is the Shenzhou, signing off,” she declares, and she ends the transmission.

_Our ship. _The phrase still makes her warm, though Michael has heard it many times by now. Philippa’s intonation turns the word from a simple possessive to an affirmation of their shared duty and trust, the irrefutable entwining of their lives. She trails a hand over the top of the captain’s chair, the metal of the frame smooth and the synthleather of the cushioned back skin-warm on her fingers, before sitting down and pulling up the analysis for the solar storms in the region.

“Commander Saru,” she calls, “what is the status from Engineering regarding the calibration of our transporters?”

As Saru answers, Cygni IV spins in the middle of the viewscreen, a jeweled pendant dangling from an unseen chain.

\-----

2200 Standard hours finds Michael in Philippa’s ready room, signing off on the shift rosters for the next three days. Her private comm beeps, and Michael feels around the desk for the device, flipping it open as she finishes and closes the last of the roster forms. “Commander Burnham here,” she says, holding the comm in front of her face.

_“I thought I would be talking to Acting Captain Burnham by now,”_ a mock-arch voice responds.

Michael leans back in her chair, setting the PADD to the side. She spares a moment to wish that reception on handheld comms were of better caliber, so she could listen to Philippa without the tinniness of the transmission detracting from their facsimile of closeness. “Are you encouraging me to descend into megalomania, Captain?”

She is already smiling. She can never help but smile when she hears Philippa’s voice when it is intended just for her, gentle and teasing and so warm that she would have thought it an impossibility—a dream—a mere few years ago, and her smile grows wider when Philippa laughs and says, _“I still have a couple tricks up my sleeve, Number One. Do not underestimate me.”_

Michael hums low in her throat as she opens up two other PADDs, cross-checking the ship’s planned itinerary with the latest orders from the ‘Fleet. “I would never dare, Captain.” 

_“How was your shift?”_

“It was uneventful, if unproductive.” Michael taps at her PADDs, highlighting the time-critical missions on their schedule. “I went down to Engineering to try and calibrate the transporters to filter out the fluctuation of the solar radiation, but the systems proved—uncooperative. Which is unfortunate, given that the latest data from the storm predicts something close to another thirty-six hours of solar turbulence. You may well have to stay for an extra day on Cygni IV.” Michael allows the tiniest of sighs to escape her chest. “I hope your day was more successful than mine, Philippa.”

Her captain’s voice is bright, even though the static of the connection. _“Not to exacerbate your difficulties by comparison, Michael, but I daresay it was. We set up a base site close to the G’tran’it caves and then went exploring along the plains. If it weren’t for how damn dry the recycled air in these suits is—”_ Philippa coughs a couple times, _“—I might even be enjoying it.”_

If Philippa were here, Michael imagines that she would be fighting the temptation to roll her eyes at her. “Please, Captain. You are enjoying it.”

Philippa laughs again, and Michael feels it as a phantom brush of tender fingers and playful lips against her face. _“You would love it here, Number One.”_ The crackle of static can’t hide the joyful awe in Philippa’s voice. Michael closes her eyes and pictures her captain’s face, the gentle creases around her eyes and mouth deepening as she smiled, the light sparking in her gaze. _“The sky here looks enormous because of how far the horizon extends, and it’s covered in thick clouds in every shade of gold. The mountains—they are like bronze, Michael, old bronze—and the rivers, the sulfur compounds from the rain crystallizes into these fragments all along the riverbank, thick as pond weeds—”_

Michael settles down into the chair and closes her eyes. Philippa’s words wash over her, winged swallows in the landscape of her imagination, drawing wonders in their wake—the clouds, as painterly as the swirls on a master’s canvas; the rocks, grand and metallic like the forgotten anvils of old gods; the waters running gold as desert sand. She only knows the plainest facts of natural law: that the concentration of sulfur compounds in the atmosphere is high enough to precipitate into solids on the planet's surface, that the corrosion of the heavy metal elements in the mountains in the air leads to the formation of a polychrome patina. 

The reverence in Philippa's description renders Michael's knowledge paltry, her precise vernacular of scientific analysis imprecise, for how can such abstract language capture the glory woven into every syllable of her captain's words? How can it compare? How can it encapsulate the sprawl of living and breathing land? It is through Philippa’s description that she can see and feel—how rich the mountains’ hue, how wide the sky, how deep the crystal rivers blooming with salt and steel.

Philippa finishes her description and then says, pitching her voice to its most low and intimate, _“I got you soil samples.”_

“How romantic,” Michael says, grinning to herself. In the privacy of the ready room, she swings her legs lightly, tapping her boots against the feet of the chair. Tucked away next to a pot of orchids, there stands a holo of the two of them from when they visited Langkawi Island together. They pose with huge smiles beneath a statue of an eagle, and Michael remembers the thick humidity of the day that settled around her like a blanket and the steadiness of Philippa’s hand at the small of her back. She runs a finger over the edges of the holo’s frame, feeling the lack of dust and grime. Philippa must dust often. 

_“If you think that’s romantic, wait until you hear about the trilithium-dense rocks we have waiting for you in our specimen cases.”_

“Oh, Philippa, you shouldn’t have.” Michael laughs, lifting the communicator up to her face and pressing the metal to her cheek. It is cold, nothing like skin, nothing like the feel of Philippa’s hand, the titanic shift of her bone and muscle beneath her skin, but it is the closest thing they have to touch right now. The connection over the handheld comms is too weak for her to hear anything softer than loud speaking tones, but Michael pretends for a moment that the wavering static is Philippa’s breathing, transmitted to her from over a hundred thousand kilometers away, filtered through two sets of metal and wire for the pleasure of her ears.

From so close, the little speaker buzzes every time Philippa talks. _“You know what this reminds me of?”_

“Procyron VIII? When Gant tried to rescue Kyriakou from the sulfur lake and I had to go in after the two of them.”

Philippa makes a noise between a snort and a laugh. _“Well, that too. But I was thinking of something marginally more glamorous.”_

Michael lets herself sink a little more into the cushioning of the chair, resting the back of her head on the padded back. “You’re talking about Barzan II. The gala.”

Philippa hums in assent. _“The gala, yes. Do you remember that night?”_

Barzan II, with its grandiose stone palaces and spires of bronze and many-colored windows shining rare and gem-like from the glittering light streaming through, its gleaming-eyed people who thrived in the toxic air. Michael remembers that gala the same way children remember their first memories, in washes of glitter and light and glorious, half-real sound. It cannot be as wonderful as she remembers. It cannot be real, if it were. And out of the many things she can say about the buildings and land—out of the many words like alabaster, citrine, diamantine burning white—she finds herself whispering, with a reverence that makes her being ache, "You looked so beautiful, Philippa."

Through all the static, her captain’s voice mirrors hers. "_As did you, Michael_."

Philippa had greeted her in the main hall of House Dar's estate, tucked away between the centuries-old _hen'it_ trees which lined the slopes of the Kalixc mountains. She was wearing an Old Earth suit with her captain’s epaulettes, the angles of her sleek in the beaming light, the steely delicacy of her wrists glinting beneath her sharp cuffs with every motion of her hands. The rafters of the building arced over her as wings, racing ever upwards, and everything was golden, spilling gold.

Michael stared, a fly caught in amber.

She ran her fingertips along the folds in the filmy layers of her dress as she searched for something to say, something that would not betray her awe, and it was a miracle when she managed, _So this is what you were hiding in the back of our closet._

_I wanted to surprise you._ Philippa’s eyes were wide, stunned and soft as she takes in Michael’s appearance, and her lips moved in silence for long seconds before she said, _As if you had any different intentions, Number One._

Michael fought down her smile as she straightens out the embroideries on her dress. _This is merely a traditional Vulcan design, Philippa. _

_Of course. Merely a traditional Vulcan design. _Philippa reached out a hand. _Forgive your provincial captain, Michael; she doesn’t know enough of traditional Vulcan designs to keep herself from being awestruck at their sight._

_Flatterer._ Michael has said that to Philippa so many times that the word garnered new meaning between them.

_Always_, Philippa responded, as she always does, like a benediction. Michael smiles, helpless to do anything but, and she took her hand—

—and they were off, spinning like figures in a crystal box, music swelling from some unknown place as their feet glided across the polished floor, and Michael was lightheaded from the gleam which came from everywhere, the press of Philippa's fingers against hers, the ebb and flow of their bodies in the loping beat of the waltz. She leaned her head on Philippa's shoulder and danced the night away, and when all their diplomacy was done and the looming stone clock marked the middle of the Barzan night with the hollow sound of bells, she caught Philippa's face between her palms and kissed her deeply, chasing the warmth in her mouth. Philippa kissed her until she was gasping, brought her hand up to her face and pressed her lips to the pulse thrumming at her wrist, to the valleys of her palms and whorls of her fingertips, and Michael felt invincible as she tugged Philippa up the stairs to their suite of rooms, whispering nonsensical, enormous things into the dizzy air.

_"After this, I'm going to request another diplomatic venture from the admiralty,"_ Philippa says now, coughing and clearing her throat again. _"Somewhere tropical. With water. And nice hotels for accommodation."_

"You'd just complain about how boring the politicians are." Michael lets herself slump over the desk, resting her chin on her crossed arms. She muffles her yawn in the crook of her elbow.

_"You sound tired, Number One."_

"I am still perfectly functional."

_“Don't tell me you’re still in the ready room going through those bedamned itineraries.”_

Michael sighs. “If I don't do them now, I'd have to remind you to do them at the beginning of next week because of your aversion to paperwork. This is more efficient on my part.”

Philippa laughs. _“Go to sleep, Number One.”_

Michael scratches at the surface of Philippa’s desk until her head clears from the clichés which spring too easily to its forefront—that their bed is cold and vast without her, that Michael is so used to Philippa hogging the blankets that she doesn't know how to cope with the wealth of comforter now at her disposal, that their room is too still without Philippa's light snores, that it has only been a day and Michael already misses her unspeakably. "Your aversion to paperwork, Philippa," she repeats weakly.

It is no use, to pretend at logic to Philippa. Her captain laughs again, gentle as touch through all the static and solar wind. _"Go back to our quarters and sleep, Michael. I'll be back before you know it,"_ she promises.

Michael slowly levers herself out of the chair. "Goodnight, Captain," she says softly into the comm.

_"Sleep well, Number One_," Philippa tells her before ending the call, and Michael feels it as a hand to her forehead, a kiss to the nape of her neck.

She tidies up the PADDs and goes back to their room. When she lies down on their bed, she thinks of other too-empty things: childhood homes, old orbit stations, starless nights. 


	2. Like Time at Old Silver

The following morning, Michael arrives at the bridge at 0745, fifteen minutes before the end of the night shift. Most of the stations are empty, their screens idle. Ensign Fan is hunched over the comms station, yawning into her hands as she flips through messages from central command and flags priority levels. Her sweatshirt is baggy, emblazoned on the front with _Lingnan University_ _Class of 2247_ in faded red and gray letters. Commander García glances up and nods at Michael as she enters, her fingers never pausing as they fly over her PADD. 

“Couldn’t sleep, Burnham?” the commander asks.

Michael sits down at the unoccupied helm and shrugs. The gesture is inelegant, virtually meaningless and so human in its ambivalence that she wouldn’t have done it had there been other people in the room. But Ensign Fan has the ship’s earpiece in one ear and a single earbud in the other, blasting Andorian crystal pop so loudly that Michael can hear its tinny strains from a full five meters away, and García—

—García was the one who took Michael aside on those first days and showed her how to zip her uniform so it didn't bunch up with her every movement, how to stand at the bridge stations so she didn't give herself a backache, and after Michael realized that the other woman's actions were not meant as insult or sabotage or any of those things which established hierarchies of belonging, she was the one who bore Michael questions about the ship and its crew until her pride stopped her from asking any more. She has seen Michael do far worse than shrug.

"I take it that means you didn't sleep much."

"I have slept an adequate amount for functionality," Michael tells the commander, surreptitiously rubbing at her eyes with the palm of her hand. She turns on her own PADD and pulls up the latest electrometric analysis of the solar storm, unable to suppress a groan when the readings confirm the predictions from last night. There is no end to the storm in sight.

The tapping of García's fingers on her PADD halts. "At least this'll all be over in a couple days," the commander tells Michael, and her voice is strangely gentle.

"Transporter malfunctions are relatively commonplace among Federation spacecraft. The majority of the crew, with the exception of core science and engineering personnel, are enjoying their de facto leave," Michael counters with no heat. Her fingers tap at the glass of her PADD in search of something to do, something to solve. "There is not enough of anything for something to be 'over'."

García snorts lightly. She finishes typing with a few emphatic taps, and her PADDs clink together as she stacks them. "Do you mind taking the conn a few minutes early, Burnham?" she asks.

"No," Michael says, perhaps a little too eagerly. "Not at all, Commander."

She settles into the captain's chair as García and Fan file through the double doors. The rest of the main bridge crew slowly filters in over the next hour. Michael had requested that they all be present for the away team’s check-in at 0900 hours before spending the day at leisure. 

Airiam, Rhys, and Gant enter the bridge as a trio, holding neon blue electrolyte drinks in their hands and chatting about Rhys’ improving hand-to-hand repertoire. They nod at Michael and sit down at their consoles. Airiam pulls out a small screwdriver set and starts feeling around the panels on the left side of her head, muttering about the damn tension in her visual implant—must be from the last set of repairs on her aperture, the mechanic didn’t know any better and screwed it in too tight. Januzzi walks in, carefully sipping at the shot glass of espresso they hold between their thumb and forefinger. Detmer is escorted to the bridge by her partner, an evening shift operations lieutenant. Michael hears Detmer telling Owosekun to _come in, Jo, sit with me, we're not even doing anything right now_, and Owosekun saying with a laugh, _I’ll see you after the captain’s call, Kay_. Saru comes in with a bowl of blueberries in one hand and a dish of salt and coriander in the other; he sets both down on his station and starts eating, dipping the fruit in the mixture and clicking his tongue in satisfaction.

"Blueberries, Michael?" Saru asks, offering her the bowl.

Michael nods. "Thank you, Saru." She picks out a couple of the berries and dusts the fruit in the spiced salt, popping them in her mouth and humming as the flavor bursts across her tongue, the salt heightening the piquancy of the sour and sweet.

"I read during my time at the Academy that humans do not experience the same pleasant taste from sodium compounds that Kelpien do," Saru says as he watches her. "You and the Captain are among the few humans in my experience who sometimes choose to eat fruit as I do."

"It's actually a fairly common practice across human cultures. Salt heightens our sense of taste. It makes sweet things seem more sweet." Michael dips another blueberry lightly in salt and eats it. "In large quantities, it is highly unpleasant, but a little bit is good."

On Doctari Alpha, Michael's mother liked to eat pineapple with salt and chili flakes; Michael had wrinkled her nose whenever she saw her doing it and exclaimed, _You're eating fruit with that? Mom, why? _She came to the Shenzhou over a decade later and found that Philippa did nearly the same thing—whenever they came to Earth spacedock, Philippa brought half a crate of green mangoes onboard and ate them with ground chilis and fish sauce. Michael tried a slice from Philippa's plate, and it tasted pungent and honeyed, like the fermented _gespar_ preserves from the markets in Shi'kahr they could only buy during the holy days of fall, when the sun rose a deep, burnished bronze over the cliffs and the fruit of the rock pears ripened. 

Michael eats a final blueberry before turning back to the viewscreen. The clouds of Cygni IV shine in front of her like swirls in a glass marble. She scrolls idly through the remainder of the reports, flagging potential avenues of analysis for the department heads, until a notification rings for an incoming transmission.

"It's the landing party, Commander," Lieutenant Januzzi announces.

Michael glances down at the display on the control panel by her hand—0858, right on time. "Patch them through."

The bridge is filled for a moment with the rasping hum of static. Michael waits as Januzzi adjusts the reception for the signal's frequency, resolving the noise into spoken sound. "_—zhou, do you copy? Can you hear us?_"

"This is the Shenzhou, Captain." Michael straightens in the chair as Philippa's voice filters through the intercom. "We hear you loud and clear."

"_Excellent._" The sound of the word is rough, likely due to the storm's interference with the signal. "_I was afraid that we were going to have to wrestle with the comms for another half hour before the signal went through._"

"Unfortunately, that is only to be expected. The initial predictions for the solar storm drastically underestimated its severity, Captain."

"_Copied loud and clear, Commander._" The comm crackles as Philippa coughs before continuing, "_We can see the effects of the radiation from down here; it's lighting up particles in the upper atmosphere. I'm guessing we have to enjoy the hospitality of Cygni IV a little longer?_"

"One to two more days is looking likely at this rate, Captain."

A loud cracking noise echoes through the bridge as Philippa coughs again. Michael stills, her eyes darting around the viewscreen. She wishes there were a visual signal, some avenue by which she can ascertain her captain's physical state. Philippa would recoil at being asked in front of the crew, at being exposed while being as fragile as the rest of them, but ask she must, because noisy transmission or no, she has never heard Philippa sound like this before, like there is something sharp inside her lungs—

_"The sooner the better, Commander,"_ Narwani says before Michael can ask. _"Today's our last day with the suits; after this, we're stuck in the oxygen field, and the air in there gets real stale real fast. And it's just an emergency backup unit, so the filter's good, but it can't neutralize every corrosive component in the air."_

The corrosive air. Michael's stomach drops, but she bites down on her instincts to ask after her Captain. "Noted, Ensign," she acknowledges instead.

Saru clears his throat. “Not to detract from the potential perils of the team’s predicament, but what about the specimens?” Michael notices the commander absent-mindedly tapping at the back of his head and convinces herself to calm at the sight of his relaxed crest. 

_“All gathered and secured, Commander,”_ Narwani says. A voice calls something unintelligible in the background, and Narwani adds,_ “Ensign Giddens told me to tell you that the p-values and gamma particle concentration—no, it’s beta, the beta particle concentration—is twice as high as predicted because of the corrosive particles in the atmosphere—you know what, Tyra? You go tell him yourself if you don’t trust me to report your stats—”_

There is a scuffling noise as Ensign Giddens comes to the comm and starts excitedly rattling off the results of the away team’s survey to Saru. The ensign is a recent transfer to the Shenzhou, fresh off a geology and astrophysics double major at the Academy, and Cygni IV is her first official mission as a 'Fleet officer. Michael remembers the woman's first day on the ship, and the ringing delight that flashed over her face when the stars came into view as they left Earth spacedock. She is likely nothing short of delighted to spend an extra day on an uninhabited L-class, braving an airless atmosphere and stinging sandstorms, exploring mountains and rivers no eyes have seen before.

Michael hopes dearly that this mission will not be the one to temper her joy.

Saru and the rest of the bridge crew listen in respectful quiet until the very end of Giddens’s report. “Thank you for sharing your findings, Ensign,” Saru says, clicking his tongue thoughtfully. “I’ll be sure to prepare the labs for the increased radiation from the samples.”

_“That’d be good, Commander. I mean. Thank you, Commander, for listening to me. And—”_ she trails off, clearing her throat, _“—Commander Burnham as well. And—the rest of the crew. For listening to me.”_

Detmer looks like she’s one stuttered phrase away from braving the planet’s atmosphere to take a manned pod down to the surface and coo at the ensign herself. “Think nothing of it, Ensign.”

Ensign Narwani comes back on the comm. _“We’re going to try to fit in a little more surveying before the suits run out of charge, Commander Burnham. We’ll see you at the next check-in at 2100.”_

“That sounds good.” Michael weighs out her words slowly. Upcoming duty rosters and mission briefs are confidential between the captain and first officer before their designated point of release to the crew. “Captain, I have some details regarding the upcoming itineraries I would like to discuss with you in private. It shouldn’t take long.”

_“Of course, Number One,”_ Philippa says.

“Ensign Narwani, Ensign Giddens, I’ll see you at 2100 hours.”

_“Copied, Commander.”_

“Best of luck on your exploration of Cygni IV. This is the Shenzhou, signing off.” 

Michael ends the call and rises, her private communicator in hand. She strides off to Philippa’s ready room, calling over her shoulder, “Commander Saru, you have the conn.”

Saru nods at her and sits down in the chair. Philippa is fine, she tells herself. It is merely a cough. The commander—whom she teases for always worrying, always fearing the worst, always seeing the dark between the stars instead of the light therein—is tranquil, absent-mindedly pouring the last of the blueberries into his palm and sprinkling a small pile of salt over them. How can he be so unfazed? What is this gnawing at the foundations of her calm, unheeding to any rational consolation?

Why is she afraid when he is not?

\-----

_“Why are you calling, Michael?” _Philippa asks the moment their connection stabilizes.

Michael glares at the comm, half-hoping that Philippa can sense her frown through the connection funneled through metal. “You know why, Philippa. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.”

Philippa’s sigh is audible. _"I’m fine. It's nothing—xerostomia from recycled air, slight respiratory difficulties from sulfide sensitivity. I'll be fine."_

There is two words' and a world's difference between _I'm fine_ and _I'll be fine_. "Nothing, Philippa?" Michael echoes. “Has none of the crew said anything about it? Do they not notice that you sound increasingly sick?”

_“I’m the captain. They only notice what I let them notice.”_

Michael groans at Philippa’s flippancy, though she knows that Philippa is right—the crew only notices what the captain lets them notice, because somewhere buried deep within all their hearts, they all still see ‘Fleet captains as the heroes on the glossy posters on the Academy’s walls, the heroes from the holoprograms they saw as children, larger than the stars and invulnerable, and Philippa Georgiou is nothing if not a Starfleet captain.

And Michael is nothing if not a first officer, doomed to bear witness to her captain’s interminable pride. “You—you can’t be so blasé with your own health—”

_“What other choice do I have?”_ Philippa’s voice hardens. _“We are on functionally stranded on an uninhabitable class L until this storm blows over. The team cannot afford to have a sick captain.”_

They are Starfleet—Michael knows that. This extends beyond Philippa’s pride in her title and her name. They are caught between adventure and catastrophe with every step they take towards discovery, peril constantly roiling beneath the brightly routine veneer of their lives. The captain catching an atmosphere-related respiratory condition would tip the away team’s predicament from an extended camping trip fully into crisis.

“That still doesn’t change the fact that you are sick,” Michael tells her. She takes a breath which only shakes slightly and says, “Talgid’s, Philippa.”

Philippa is quiet for a moment after the word is out in the open. _“Unlikely,”_ she replies.

“We learn about Talgid's during the first week of mandatory survival training. Four out of five cases are fatal, and they all start with mouth dryness and difficulty breathing.”

_"Michael—" _Philippa starts, but she breaks off to cough, and Michael winces. _"Trust me on this. I know my own health."_

“You sound—” Michael chooses her words meticulously and decides on, “—awful.”

Her captain snorts. _"Flatterer."_

"Vulcan-raised," Michael retorts instinctively. "Philippa, I am—I cannot help but be concerned for you. You don't have to pretend in front of me like you do in front of the crew—"

_"—and yet you are one of my crew, Michael."_

It is another one of those things which seethes beneath the surface of their lives alongside the constant dangers of space travel—the knowledge of their places in the chain of command, the threat of personal compromise their relationship represents. It only rises to the surface in moments such as this, when the threat of the future looms heavy. _The ship will always come first, and our crew, and our oaths of duty, _Philippa had told her once. They are captain and commander first and lovers second, and Michael swore to herself from the first that she would bear that gladly.

That does not keep her from gripping her communicator firmly as she keeps herself from reacting to the tightness in Philippa's words. Her captain must somehow sense it, despite their lack of visual communication, because Philippa's voice softens as she says, _"Stop worrying about me, Number One."_

“I cannot help but worry," Michael repeats. "It is my professional job as well as my personal inclination to look out for your wellbeing—”

_“I do not have Talgid’s.”_ Philippa’s statement is nigh-on a scoff.

"You have the symptoms. There is an entire handbook on it."

_"Since when did you care so much about the scary stories the Academy told you, Commander?"_

"Since it was your life on the line, Captain," Michael snaps.

There is a moment of quiet. When Philippa speaks again, she sounds sharp enough to cut. _"I've spent two and a half decades in space. I've breathed more recycled air than fresh in my life, Michael, and I've been on more L and K class planets than you have seen in simulations. I know my own capabilities. Don't presume to worry about me."_

"Philippa—" 

Michael breaks off. The static is loud in the silence that follows, and she is too aware of the vast space creating that electric noise, the thousands of kilometers of cold and corrosive air that separates them. Philippa is surrounded by sand and clouds which might be eating away at her lungs like time at old silver, and Michael cannot reach her.

She wants to see her. She wants to touch her. The distance gnaws at her belly like a thing with teeth.

Philippa starts again, and her voice is gentler, as close to apologetic as Michael has ever heard it. _“Even if it is Talgid’s, Michael, there is nothing you can do about it.”_

“I know.” Her voice is too loud and too raw, dragged from her throat on hooks and barbs, and her tongue is bitter with it, her mouth welling with it, her sudden furious helplessness. “I know, Philippa. I know—”

_“I’ll be okay,”_ Philippa tells her, and Michael knows that those words are one of those promises her captain cannot make and she cannot accept, but she still clings to the sound of them nonetheless.

The best indicator of future performance is past performance, and this is Captain Philippa Georgiou, whose service record ranks among the best in Starfleet, who saved the settlers on Gamma Lyra and swam with the ice sharks on Andoria IV and drank sweet wine on Zana Prime as the first outworlder to touch Zanan glass. A little dry air will not harm her. A little dry air _cannot_ harm her, because they have to escort diplomats to the Cressian system next, and they have to survey the moons of the Algol II Perseids after that, and then they have to bring water filtration supplies to the towns of Ser'hld after that, and then—

—and then they have a whole itinerary of missions. They have scores on scores of missions, far-flung through every system of the Alpha Quadrant, for which the crew needs their captain, and the Shenzhou its guide through the stars, and Michael—Philippa. 

“You should use the suits while you still can,” Michael manages after long, futile moments, clenching and unclenching her free hand in want of something to do. “I’m going—I'll go help run the next rounds of electrometric analysis.”

_“Take care of my ship, Number One.”_

“I will, Philippa.”

Michael ends the call and presses the comm to her forehead, breathing deeply. The metal is cool and unyielding. There are promises she cannot make. There are some promises she must. Should something go wrong—she tries not to think about how, should something go wrong, there is little else she can do.


	3. The Spaces of Others

Commander Vo shoos Michael from the transporter room at 1045 hours, telling her that she is making the ensigns nervous with her hovering, and that Vo herself is perfectly capable of lending a hand in number-crunching. She co-wrote a paper at the Academy on solar turbulence, thank you very much—she may now spend her days elbow-deep in dilithium chamber discharge, but she still knows her way around a chart here and there. She can certainly read them well enough to use them to tinker with transporter frequencies. Michael steps away from the transporter controls, perhaps with a hint of sheepishness, and Vo claps her on the shoulder and reminds her, “Drinks next week, Commander?”

“Of course,” Michael assents with a small smile. “Commander,” she adds.

Irene Vo was the one she had gone to in those first months, when Captain Georgiou baffled her with her too-easy camaraderie with the crew and the crew themselves were so friendly that Michael despised herself for wondering if they were being false but wondered it nonetheless. The chief of engineering found her one day kneeling next to a broken control panel, studiously soldering the severed wires to their correct terminals.

_Not a lot of people know how to use a soldering iron anymore,_ Commander Vo commented over her shoulder.

_Because this technology became largely defunct after the widespread introduction of fiber optic relays and compacted transmission panels,_ Michael rattled off without turning around.

_Then how do you know how to solder, Burnham? I would’ve thought that Vulcan tech has all the latest updates._

Self-despisal came easy to her then, and she didn’t answer the other woman, too busy cataloguing the multitude of points where she diverged from the descriptor of _Vulcan_. Commander Vo didn’t prompt her for a response. She sat down next to Michael and picked up the other soldering iron, and they started to work in silent tandem. Commander Vo’s hands were steady and swift. Michael repeated her words in her head. They were absent of any vice save curiosity. 

_My mother,_ Michael said out loud at last, _had a hobby of refurbishing antique automobiles._

_Amanda Grayson fixes old cars?_

The question was so sudden and so strange that it jarred her into laughing—for the first time since she set foot on the ship. Since she started packing for the Shenzhou. Since Sarek told her the news. She tried to picture Amanda—brilliant, proud Amanda, who never left their house unless her robes were spotless—in Gabrielle Burnham's garage on Doctari Alpha, with grease on her forearms and face, and the image made her laugh even more.

Commander Vo had been a mechanic before she joined the 'Fleet. She's been on the Shenzhou since Philippa was given her commission, and Philippa says that if Irene ever left, the old girl would fall out of the sky from grief. On the days after the nights when Michael wakes up cold and afraid, when she's sparred all she can and left from her weekly appointment with Dr. Rao and still feels like the edges of her are fraying away, she goes down to Engineering to sit in the muted din and surround herself with things she half-remembers—soldering irons, spanners, the buzz of hands on metal—and waits until Irene calls Philippa to come bring her home.

"We'll bring her back," Commander Vo tells Michael in parting as she leaves from the transporter room. "We'll do it, Burnham."

"I have every faith in your abilities, Commander."

The last thing she sees of the transporter room is the commander flashing her a loose salute before she turns away.

Lieutenant Alyas, the current officer in charge of the science wing, points Michael to an empty corner of Lab 4 when she comes to offer her assistance on their research on the solar storm. Michael bites down on a sigh as she sits at an unoccupied station. She's being humored. She knows it. The science department is now humoring her the way security officers humor Philippa whenever she pokes around their training sessions. Is this what it means to be a captain? To have her subordinates indulge her as they would a child? 

Michael decides, for their collective dignity and peace of mind, that it was her plan all along to spend her downtime in a quiet corner of the science labs. And look at that—she even brought her personal PADD with her. 

Forty-five minutes later, the history on her PADD is nothing but articles on Talgid's.

She sets the tablet down with a clatter, rubbing at her eyes with her knuckles. The tightness she can feel just behind her field of vision refuses to be coaxed out. She isn’t a doctor. She isn’t a medical specialist. She has ten weeks of mandatory first aid training, the same as any ensign on the ship. Her understanding of medicine comes through the abstraction of bodies into compounds and charts—she knows the chemical processes behind corrosion and oxidation, the dismantling of molecules into different systems when they come into contact with flesh and blood and oxygen. She knows the fundamentals of life, the most atomic basis behind sickness and health, behind the conditions of all living beings. And still she knows nothing. She can do nothing, affect nothing—there is nothing to be done, a great absence, like the yawning of space between the ship and the planet, like the span between her and her captain, a futile and hateful lack, and if Philippa were here—

—if Philippa were here, none of this fear would be twisting the threads of Michael’s thoughts to snarl, if Philippa were here, she would be _here_ and safe and hale, if Philippa were here—

—she would tell Michael to stop worrying. Stop fretting over something so useless as the intractable future. _Go do something and take your mind off of it, Number One. Didn’t you like to make pottery, that one time you tried it in the holosuite?_

Michael is terrible at pottery. She’d made a mess of her hands and the table, all for a lopsided little pot that couldn’t even hold a cup’s worth of tea, but when the program gave her the option to _save her masterpiece on her digital shelf!_, she did, and left the holosuite smiling faintly, rubbing at the phantom clay on her fingers. 

Hobbies are an old strangeness to her. When she was a child, she filled her house with her masterpieces—squiggly drawings of wonderful star-monsters on the glass of old PADDs, spaceships wrought from glue and spare screws from her mother’s workshop, flowers and cranes folded from the real, brittle paper her aunt sent her from Epsilon Zana. After dinner, her mother and father taught her how to play chess and Scrabble and card games from Sol III and Andoria Prime alike. Their Scrabble tiles had characters in six of the primary Federation languages, and the games would inevitably deteriorate into debates on whether or not Tellarite glottal stops qualify in phonetic spellings of Standard words.

Her home was her kingdom, and Michael grew there as all children did, with an ardent desire to be a king, a painter, an actor, a scientist, a poet; to be all things all at once in a wide and welcome world. Her father saved everything she made, no matter what it was.

But after she went to Vulcan—after she grew up—she learned that her desire to be all things was foolish, inane. Logic dictates that all beings are limited. Her muscles and nerves could only learn so many motions, the human mind only so many paradigms. She was a poor artist; what then was the point of drawing out the creatures she imagined in space? What creatures were there that her textbooks didn’t cover? Her brother tried to show her how to play the lyre of her new planet, but her human-clumsy fingers stumbled across the strings. Why should she keep at a hobby that reminded her of the color of her blood, the inelegance of her language? Where is the logic in perpetuating her shortcomings?

There were other pastimes, Vulcan pastimes she could hone, and so she did. She played chess against her brother until they both performed well enough to compete in tournaments, practiced _suus mahna_ every day between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. Her humanity gave her a light frame; her childhood on an orbital station with low artificial gravity had lowered the density of her bone and muscle beyond that, made greater the spaces between the particles of her marrow. A Vulcan body—a Vulcan heart—was beyond the bounds of her ability, but she could sharpen her intellect on the constraints of logic, train her limbs and joints to move so they belied her the breakability of her bones. 

She used her spare time to catch up in her studies, learning half a decade's worth of astrophysics formulae and historical anecdotes in a timespan that took even Sarek aback. In the beginning, the learning programs at Shi'kahr Primary would routinely fail her for her blatant emotional diction during their tests of logic, so she sat at her console at home for hours on end and learned how to pitch her voice so the computers would accept her answers. These became her hobbies—arguing with code to prove her belonging on her planet, answering prompts on Federation history until she could speak on tragedy and joy alike with detachment.

How many years did it take to build an ecologically stable biome on Mars? One hundred and nine. How many settlements were built on the Mars model in the late 22nd century, allowing the inhabitants of Sol III to journey into deep space for the first time? Forty-three. What was the location of the most recent Klingon raid in Federation territory? The science outpost on Doctari Alpha. How many survivors were there from the Doctari Alpha raid? One. Would any intervention have improved this outcome? No. 

She answered these prompts until she could recite them by heart, question and answer, sing the call and response like the nursery rhyme in the picture books her grandmother once sent her—how many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Aye, there and back again—

“—breaking for lunch now, Commander, if you want to come along—”

Lieutenant Alyas’ words jolt Michael from her thoughts. “I—yes.” Michael glances down at her PADD. It is ten minutes after Standard noon. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

The mess hall is mostly empty, still as the eye of a storm compared to the usual noon rush. Crewmembers chatter in loose groups around scattered tables, the colors of their off-uniform clothes bright against the utilitarian durasteel of the Shenzhou’s walls. The noises they make blur like the chirping of crickets on Earth summer nights, or the calling of red sand frogs during the driest days of Vulcan’s autumn. Michael orders her usual lunch—green tea, a tomato and basil sandwich with whole wheat bread and mozzarella on the side, a slice of apple pie on the days when she wants pie and a slice of coconut cake on the days when she wants cake—and weaves her way through the empty chairs to where Detmer, Owosekun, and Alyas are sitting.

“May I?” Michael asks, motioning to the empty seat at their table.

Detmer nods so vigorously that a cherry tomato falls off her fork. "Of course, Commander," she says, pushing out the seat with her knee.

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Michael sits down and begins to eat her meal without further remark.

The other three start their conversation again, dispelling the lull her presence caused, and Michael silently notes the familiarity of their addresses, the easy give and take of their exchanges. She is the only one at the table still in her full uniform, her jacket zipped up to her neck. She must be the only one there to think with the rigor of titles and the hierarchies folded therein.

"—think you have to try the beach holoprogram again, Fatimah. Jojo just showed me the coolest hack—"

“Kay, I was in that sim every two weeks before I gave up on it—no matter what I did, it felt like wet cement whenever I sat down—”

"It's so simple it's barely even coding," Owosekun tells her. "Two lines and _bam_, the texture of the sand is a hundred times better."

"Did you really get the sand to feel like sand?" Alyas turns to Owosekun. "How?"

"You have to go in and edit the scatter in the beta small scale texture matrix."

Alyas groans. "The beta scatter—I was messing with alpha generational the whole time. And then bumping beta scatter increases the overall render rate too, why didn't I think of that?" She pauses. "You sure you grew up a Luddite, Jo?"

"Sure as I can be. Replicators still weird me out," Owosekun says with a grin. 

The three of them laugh. Michael finishes the last bite of her sandwich. She wonders what it would be like to laugh so easily at the dreams of the past.

When Michael first came to the Shenzhou, she watched as her fellow crewmembers punctuated the monotony of life aboard a starship with wonderful, gleeful marginalia, the sort she only knew from memories of a childhood she sometimes half-thought she dreamt. Detmer and Alyas had their holoprograms, Januzzi and Airiam played kadis-kot together twice a week, Rhys spent his free time in fantasy boxing sims, and Saru tended his garden—all of them grown, all of them still clinging to their card games and Scrabble games, their doodles of the things between the stars. The captain listened to jazz and sparred and played four variants of chess, and when Michael came across her commanding officer in the mess hall one night, the captain’s PADD was playing a torrid soap holovid about the early days of the ‘Fleet, and Michael had stared in bemusement at the sight for a solid half-minute until she saw the captain looking up at her, and she hastened from the room, determined to give her captain a semblance of dignity.

_It’s fun, Michael,_ Philippa would tell her long after that incident, as Michael tucked her head beneath her captain's chin and groaned at the terrible acting on the screen propped between their thighs. _It’s something to pass the time. It’s not supposed to be good, or beneficial. You should try it. Watch something awful now and then. _

Michael has never harbored any desire to watch a burgeoning star-crossed romance between two fictional admirals, but she discovered—re-discovered—other ways to pass the time. She still keeps up with _suus mahna_ and chess, and delights ensigns with her vintage Scrabble set. She reads classical literature. Works on historical food reconstructions. Hacks replicators to reproduce her favorite dishes. Hones her horrid pottery.

Philippa convinces her to save everything she tries to make.

Detmer is now chiming in, lightly nudging her girlfriend's side, "Jojo’s so much of a Luddite that she's building a goddamn hydroponic farm in our quarters. Says that she doesn't trust veggies zapped to life—"

"I'm serious, Kay! You know where the replicators get the raw matter for their food generation? Waste and refuse. We are eating our own—"

"It's sanitized first," Detmer points out with a giggle. "And then, like, broken down into atomic soup. It's beyond fine for biological consumption—"

"But then the food isn't even real! It's just—zapped atomic soup—"

"It's real enough that I don't eat replicated pork products, even though it's not even technically from a pig," Alyas says, taking a large bite out of her lamb burger. She grimaces and fishes out the pickles before taking another. "And it tastes the exact same as the real stuff. Good parts and bad parts."

"It tastes different."

Detmer rolls her eyes. "It tastes _the same_, Jojo."

Michael looks down at her slices of mozzarella. They are arrayed in a perfect fan mimicking an arrangement from a charcuterie board, each slice angled precisely twenty degrees from the one before it, with a sliver of basil tucked in-between. No living hands could have arranged the food so carefully. She misses the inaccuracies of fresh food. Replicators are now advanced enough to include slight imperfections in dishes, browned edges and crispy bits of crust which keep the generated product from being uncanny. There is absolutely no quantifiable difference between replicated and non-replicated comestibles, but there is something about the grit of a hand-prepared meal entirely elided in a replicated one.

Coming from a human, such opinions are easily dismissed as a quirk, nostalgia in a harmless incarnation. From a former Luddite, they are an expression of ingrained culture. Philippa can groan about replicator food at length in the privacy of their quarters; Owosekun can debate the merits of replicator tech with colleagues at her leisure—

—but from a Vulcan-raised anthropologist? From a commander? Michael can easily gather a slew of indictments for her sentiments—that they are indeed sentiments, the basest sentimentality, too human to be borne; that her comments would be invasive or unnecessary at best; that her rank would provoke discomfort or skew the debate; that she has no claim to their friendship and no right to such frivolities—

"What about you, Commander? Where do you stand on replicated food?" Alyas asks, clearing her throat.

_Commander_—she would have once thought it strange, that the lieutenant can condense five years' worth of interactions into three syllables. She sounds stilted, formal, unsure. She sounds awkward.

She sounds sincere.

Michael tilts her head. "I am forced to agree with Lieutenant Owosekun on this one."

Owosekun grins and fist-pumps in triumph, and then freezes with her hand in mid-air as Michael glances at her. The lieutenant's grin starts to fall. Michael lets the corners of her lips twitch and her right eyebrow rise, and Owosekun's smile breaks wide again across her face.

"What? You think that—" Detmer breaks off with a cough. "I mean—what—what rationale do you have for your belief? Sir," she adds hastily.

"I have no coherent rationale behind it—please, Lieutenants, contain your surprise," Michael says dryly when the women open their mouths in unison to react.

She pushes her plate of coconut cake to the center to the table. The unglazed bottom of the plate scrapes against the surface of the tabletop. It is a mountainous dessert—soft-crumbed cake, swirls of meringue frosting, toasted coconut sprinkled all around. "I coded this during my first year here," Michael says. "The proportions are based on my aunt's recipe. She sent me the recipe almost a decade ago, and I've been tinkering with it ever since. In terms of the purely physical sensation of taste, it cannot be differentiated from hers. But there's always something—just a little off about it. Just a little bit strange."

Owosekun nods along. "That's how I feel with any rice dish out of a replicator. I eat it, and I immediately think of how my father made it. And it's never as good."

"Maybe things just taste better in memory.” Alyas shrugs. “The grass is always greener, and all that."

Simple nostalgia, the basest sentimentality. Is it really that easy to explain? Michael slowly cuts a small piece from her slice of cake and tastes it. She remembers watching as her aunt took the cake from the oven while her uncle whipped the meringue for the frosting, the ice blue sunset on Mars staining the window behind them. She remembers the smell of that cake, its sweetness, her mother's exclamations of delight when she took a bite. The dessert in front of her, with its bare composition of sucrose and complex starch, cannot compare.

"It has been a while since I've had the original cake," Michael admits. 

“That looks so good, though," Owosekun says. "I don't think I've ever tried the cakes from the replicator."

Michael gestures at the cake with her fork, halfway through another bite. "Go ahead," she says.

They all still. Michael does, too, taken aback by—her own unprofessionalism? her frivolousness? Her daring to intrude, to impinge on the spaces of others?

"—thank you, sir," Owosekun says, perhaps too enthusiastically for the situation. She slowly takes the tiniest forkful, not even a bite, but her eyes widen when she chews and swallows, and the next piece she cuts off is much bigger. "Stars, Commander, this is really, really good—"

Detmer eyes the cake and starts, "Can I—"

Michael nods, and Detmer hums in satisfaction when she eats a bite. Alyas cuts a careful section of cake without any frosting, and her eyebrows fly up when she tries it. 

"Damn, Commander. Are you sure this isn't as good as your aunt's?" Alyas asks. 

The lieutenant's question is clearly rhetorical, but Michael no longer knows what answer to give. She only knows that she should answer. They opened their conversation to her, made space for the unsure pauses in her diction, and she dearly wants to show her gratitude in her reply. It sounds better than an answer when she says simply, "I'm glad you like it, Lieutenant."

She gets another slice of cake for herself, and another to share.


	4. From Which There Was No Harbor

At 2100 hours, Cygni IV spins gently in the viewscreen, an old burnished watch on a chain swinging from a great hand. Michael stares out at the planet, tapping aimlessly at a harmless corner of the control panel with her fingernail as she listens to Commander Vo, Lieutenant Alyas, and Commander Saru brief the away team on the updated projections for the storm.

"—know that our lateral transporters can't collate signals the way vector models can. Ambient space needs to be clear as Bajoran glass for surface-to-ship beaming because of the heavy levels of ionized radiation already in the atmosphere." Vo jabs at her PADD with her grease-stained finger. "With the radiation levels we have projected, there’s only one window, approximately two days from now, when we’ll have enough time to beam you all up."

_“That’s the closest point of extraction? Two days from now?”_ Philippa coughs. Her voice—sounds no better. No worse, but no better.

"Unfortunately, yes, Captain." Alyas pulls up a projection graph on the viewscreen, obscuring the planet. “The solar storm is too strong, otherwise.”

Michael adjusts the display, zooming in on the section of the graph with the lowest expected radiation levels. "It looks like the window begins at 1654 on Standard Earth Date 2254.89, or about another full solar day on this planet, Captain," she says. "We have a window of—eight minutes, at a minimum. Fifteen, if the storm allows."

_“Eight at a minimum and fifteen if we’re lucky. The old girl can beam us all up with a window like that—right, Irene?”_

“That’ll be more than enough."

Saru harrumphs. "However, Captain, you should keep in mind that this estimate does not amount for surface turbulence. Sandstorms, acid precipitation—"

"Those don't count for shit," Vo dismisses, waving her hand at the screen. 

"Surface phenomena, so long as it’s not significantly reactive, has no effect on transporter reception, Commander Saru," Michael adds. "All Commander Vo needs, I believe, is a thirty to forty second window with no solar turbulence to lock and amplify the biosignals of the landing party."

“Burnham’s right.” Vo nods shortly. “So long as the ship behaves, we’ll get them back in that window with no problem.” The commander grimaces. “And the ship will behave, if it’s the last thing I do.”

_“Don’t threaten her, Irene. I thought I told you to be nice to my ship.”_

“It’s your ship’s fault you aren’t here.” Vo claps her hands. “I have to get back to Engineering now, but I’ll let Burnham tell you all about your transporter issues.”

The crew dissolves into muted giggles as Vo leaves. Michael manages a smile and says out loud, “Rest assured that I will talk to you about the transporters upon your arrival, Captain, but we have other concerns now. How are the conditions on-planet?”

_“Stormy as Tellar Prime in winter.”_ The background buzz of static grows louder and resolves into a dull roar as the communicator rustles in Philippa’s grip. _“Can you all hear that? That’s the sound of the sand blowing around outside.”_

Philippa must be raising the comm towards a generated protective field. “You activated the emergency stasis field on the oxygen generator?” Michael asks.

_“It activated itself, Commander,”_ Ensign Narwani says loudly, vying with the wind. _“The sandstorms are so strong that they blow straight through all the cave networks and flood the tunnels with sand. We’re bunking by the side of a large stone formation now. It’s blocking some of the wind from us, which is helping a little.”_

“Is the stasis field strong enough to withstand these conditions?”

_“Don’t worry about us, Number One. It sounds like the sand is scraping against durasteel.”_ The noise lessens, presumably as Philippa lowers the comm. Her voice is still coming through the reception scratched and hoarse, but the happy lilt of it is untarnished. _“We can’t move camp; we can’t go out because the EV suits are drained, and quarters are a little crowded, but it is more than safe in here. The stasis containment mode is programmed to activate in extreme conditions and to stay active as such conditions persist. Not a single grain of sand is getting in, and I doubt we could go out even if we wanted to. Even the air recycling is cleaner in stasis.”_

“The stasis module attachment is the ‘Fleet’s most recent model,” Michael says. Her captain sounds no better, but she also sounds no worse. “There are benefits to newer technology, Captain.”

_“I thought you were going to wait for me to come back before taking me to task for my transporters, Commander.”_

Her words are playful, which Michael would normally feel an urge to admonish, but now all she wants is to tell Philippa that she would debate anything with her, from the issues with the hunk of space junk they called their ship to the theoretical discrepancies of warp core mechanics to the plotlines of tawdry holovids, should only Philippa come home. The silence on the bridge stretches on for far too long before Michael says belatedly, “I am capable of discussing your out-of-date technology with you on multiple occasions, Captain.”

Philippa laughs. _“Of course, Number One.”_ The grit of the sound does nothing to conceal its fondness. _“Do you have a moment after this call? We need to discuss what to report to the ‘Fleet for repairs.”_

Michael stiffens. “Of course, Captain,” she replies immediately. “If that’s all—we will see you at 0900 hours sharp.”

“Copied.” The reception crackles against Narwani's voice. “See you then, sirs.”

The comm ends as Michael rises from the captain’s chair. Detmer grins as she walks past, and Michael nods at her absently as she heads to the ready room, her hands already pulling the communicator from her belt.

\-----

“Have your symptoms escalated?” Michael asks the moment Philippa answers her comm.

_“No,”_ Philippa hastens to reassure her. _“No—don’t worry, Michael, I’m doing alright. Better than I was yesterday.”_

“I—” Michael breaks off. “I always appreciate your company, but I still have to ask why you wanted to—”

_“Because I thought you would want it.”_

Michael sighs. It is too loud in the empty room, a puff of wind escaping the cavern of her lungs. “Yes,” she admits.

_“And because I know that you are trying to be circumspect in front of the bridge crew, especially since you are acting captain. No one ever talks about itineraries two days in a row; that would be unrealistic.”_

“I—yes,” Michael repeats, laughing a little. “I suppose it would be.”

She lets the tension seep from her spine, slowly allowing it to curve and settle into the back of her chair. Philippa is okay. She is only calling to make sure that Michael is okay—and here it occurs to Michael to feel guilty, that she has imposed these concerns on her captain when the woman is already burdened and over-burdened by her current circumstances. “Thank you, Philippa,” she says in a small voice. 

_“I’m doing better, Number One,”_ Philippa murmurs. Michael is tired and not above pretending that her captain is close. _“I’ll be okay.”_

“I hope so,” is all Michael can say.

_“I will.”_

There are some promises Philippa can make and many she cannot, and Michael suddenly understands with a stunning alacrity the appeal of empty words. “You should rest your voice."

_"I have plenty of voice left in me."_ Philippa takes a breath. Michael tracks the crackles in the sound. _"I want to talk to you, too. I want to tell you about the sand here, and the mountains."_

"You can tell me when you come back," Michael tells her.

_"Five minutes."_

"I will be timing you."

Philippa laughs, a scratchy and beautiful sound. _"Of course you will,"_ she says, and Michael folds, crossing her arms on the desk and letting her head rest in their cradle. _“I wish you could see the sky right now. The light is filtering through the sand as it moves. It feels like we’re underwater, looking up at the sun.”_

“It sounds like Vulcan.”

_“It is. Like the sandstorm our last night there.”_

Philippa has one memory of one sandstorm on Vulcan—the roaring of the wind beneath the awnings of Sarek’s house and between the red branches of the _gespar_ trees; the sand swirling against the halos of the streetlamps; the cocoon of their blankets around the warmth of their tangled arms and legs; the words they spoke, refuge from the fury. Michael remembers that storm, and many other storms besides, lightning-laced and implacable, churning the sky into a sea of red dust from which there was no harbor. 

They terrified her when she first came to the planet. Amanda would come into her room to find her huddled against the wall, as far away from the window as she could get, digging her fingers into her arms to keep from covering her ears at the pounding sound. She would lead Michael into her brother's room then, at the heart of the house, where there were no windows at threat of being broken. The three of them sat together on his bed, and he often tugged on Michael’s sleeve and whispered, as if he were afraid of being heard, that he was afraid of the storms as well. 

They both grew to love the storms as they grew older, the unrestrained lash and snap of the thunder. Part of their love was awe-stricken curiosity at the scope and beauty of the phenomena. The greater part of their love might have been vicarious, though that by no means diminishes the glory of the sand and wind in Michael’s mind.

The roar of the storm on Cygni IV is loud, threatening to obscure Philippa's voice. _"I'll have plenty of time to appreciate the scenery, in any case. We have two days left in this bubble, and no one's even brought a deck of cards."_

"Doesn't Narwani have all the subroutines for arcade games on her tricorder by now?"

_"I'd be shocked if she does not, but there're only so many times one can play Tetris on a souped-up graphing calculator."_ Philippa snorts. _"I'll let the ensigns have their fun."_

Philippa Georgiou is meant to be above boredom, above the allures of Tetris and cards. All captains are. "There should be a spare PADD or two in the landing kit," Michael tells her. "I don't think they have anything pre-loaded, but you can check."

_"I'll look tomorrow."_ Philippa sighs. _"Get a head start on my report, if nothing else. The landing party will have an exemplary model for captainly behavior for the next forty-eight hours."_

Michael props the metal of her comm on her cheek, flexing her freed fingers against the tabletop as she listens to Philippa detail the landing party’s findings. She imagines the chatter of the sand surrounding her as it does Philippa, as if they were wrapped in the same gales.

Sarek told her one night that there was no logic in fearing the storms, and not much more in admiring them—they were only dust particles shuffled about by differences in atmospheric pressure, lit from within by the natural laws governing charged particles, easily tamed by infrastructure and studied by sentient minds. She should not allow them to detract from her progress in her studies. Those words were the closest thing in her father’s capacity to what she knew as comfort, and she was grateful for them, for all that they failed to buoy her as she turned back to her work.

She can’t total the hours in her adolescence she spent like that, with a PADD in her hands and a storm all around her. The examination modules at school were a mystery to her, their grading algorithms so strict that they failed her for the imprecision of her answers and the hesitation in her tone. She worked for hours every day at home, verbally answering questions on mock exams from her PADD until she could answer even the most difficult questions.

On a school-wide examination day, the first one held after the attacks, the testing module asked her in its robotic voice, _how many survivors are there from the Doctari Alpha raid?_ The words made her sick to her stomach, but she thought about Sarek watching, about making him proud, and answered in a voice as level as the computer’s, _one_. And then the computer asked, _would any intervention have improved this outcome?_ And though she knew that the required answer was _no_, and that nothing short of that simple and succinct negative would be accepted—she thought she could prove herself. 

Instead of answering the module's question, she prompted the computer with a query of her own: _how many access points were there to the Doctari Alpha settlement?_

From there she spun a wild tale of questions and suppositions, asking the module to calculate probabilities every step along the way for every hypothetical—if they had been more prepared, if the Federation had given them more advanced warning, if the alarms in the research labs were synchronized with the settlement-wide alerts instead of manually triggered. The probabilities were small, but still there. Somewhere in the midst of all her questions, the other students and exam proctors had stopped their testing to watch her, and she realized the force of their cool gazes only distantly as her chain of questions barreled on to their logical—utterly logical, indisputable—end. Because the exam modules at Shi'kahr Primary were designed to test logic, not merely knowledge, and the true question the computer had asked her was whether or not people in danger _could_ be saved, whether or not they _should_ be, and the answer to that is_ always_. The logic of life dictates its value, and they should always try and strive to save others, no matter how minute the chances—so long as there is some sliver of probability, some dim hope, they had a duty to try and surmount those odds so long as that fundamental logic of life applies, so why shouldn't they be saved? Wouldn't it be rational, computer, to try and save them? Wouldn't it be logical?

And the computer said, after a long silence,_ processing request_. 

Michael was about to prompt the program again, to press on towards triumph, when the lights of her module fizzed out like the stars at dawn and she looked up into the blank face of the lead proctor.

She was lead into the proctors’ office, where Sarek was waiting. The proctor condemned her for her emotional display, told her that she would be expelled should an incident of this magnitude occur again, and departed from the room. Sarek studied her for long seconds after the proctor left. _Your heart is so human_, he finally said, and for all he was inexpressive, she could read his face. She knew immediately what he thought of her, his disappointment and pity and resignation, and after he took his leave without saying another word, she sat alone in the room until she was no longer on the verge of tears.

The next time the computer asked her, _should you save them?_, she remembered her mother on Doctari Alpha smiling through her fear as she said, _I love you, baby girl,_ and the kisses her mother on Vulcan pressed to the crown of her head as the sand whipped around their house, and she thought about being brave and being proud, about making sure she’s worthy of all the love they lavished, worthy of being the one who lived, and she answered—

_—no._

_"—air is technically breathable with filtration, but the precipitation and the sandstorms are so extreme, I think we might have to ultimately change this planet's classification to a Class J,"_ Philippa finishes. _"It's beautiful, though. Gods above, Michael, I don't have the words. It's so beautiful here."_

"I know, Philippa," Michael says softly. She runs her fingers over the textured metal of the comm, craving some hint of touch. "It's been five minutes."

Philippa sighs. _"I really should be resting my voice, shouldn't I? These bedamned filters—"_

"We can talk more tomorrow."

_"Goodnight, Number One."_ Philippa's words are hazy against the storm. _"I'll see you very soon."_

"Goodnight, Philippa," Michael whispers. She ends the call, and the rustle of the wind fades to nothing. 

She dreams of a planet of sand, and of things slipping away. 

\-----

When Michael directs Januzzi to call the away team at 0900 the next morning, Ensign Narwani answers the comm. Her voice is small and timid as she asks, _"Commander Burnham? Are you there?"_

The ensign's hesitant tone punches the breath from Michael's chest. This is the woman who faced down a rogue Andorian battle cruiser during a training mission gone wrong and flew next to Michael and Detmer when they were testing the Shenzhou's manned pods. Narwani flew for eleven minutes at five G's with no hesitation, and now she sounds afraid.

“Ensign?" Michael prompts. "Do you have any updates on the situation on-planet?”

There is a long silence, and Michael counts it the way she was taught, cataloguing the seconds. Narwani starts, _"The captain—"_

She trails off, and Michael's hands tighten on the armrests of the chair. She wants to plead with the ensign to stop, but she knows she cannot, so she commands in her steadiest voice, "Report, Ensign." It is the voice she learned to affect when she had to answer _no_ to the question of _should you save them?_

She can hear Narwani taking a deep breath before she answers, and she closes her eyes as the words come.

_"It's slow-onset Talgid's Syndrome."_


	5. Fallible Mechanisms

“The manned pods.”

Vo shakes her head. “They aren’t designed for atmospheric entry, much less with that dense of a stratospheric layer.”

“Landing shuttles.”

“Under repair, Commander.” Gant fiddles with his PADD, tapping furiously at a corner of the display. "Even if they weren’t, it would be almost impossible to accurately target locations on the surface without some sort of signal, and given the solar storm in conjunction with the surface-level wind and sand turbulence, we wouldn’t be able to pick up on their signal anyways.”

Michael’s knuckles are pale from how tightly her hands are clenched. “We take the ship down.”

“It’s—possible,” Detmer says slowly. “If we had a lock on their location, I’d say definitely, but without the signal you mentioned, Kamran, it’s a lot harder. I can fly us down to a spot close to the landing party’s initial drop-off point for us to do a survey with the scanners. But to get to the next survey point—the ship doesn’t have the capacity to maneuver around the surface terrain down there, it’s too close-knit, so I’d have to take her back up to low-orbit levels to get to the survey point. One or two atmospheric entries’ll be fine, but more than that would put a lot of strain on our systems—I guess we could split-warp between scanning points.” 

Split-warping is a ‘Fleet legend, technically possible but so difficult that it only merits a cautionary footnote in the official regulations, for all that it is perilous. Warp was invented for travel on the cosmic scale. Short distance warps of a tenth of a light year or less are notoriously inconsistent and difficult to control; split-warping, used to designate warp travel on a biological scale, at distances of kilometers or even less, has seen starships materialize within mountains or underground, their crewmembers’ atoms scattered in the dust.

Detmer’s eyes are lit like stained glass in the blue of the screen lights. Her jaw is squared, her face set and intent. “There’s a chance I can do it, sir,” she announces after a long pause. “Not a big chance, but a chance.”

Michael’s breath escapes between her teeth in a thin, tight sigh. “No, Lieutenant,” she says softly. “I have every faith in your abilities, but we cannot risk the lives on this ship for such odds.” 

She looks up and meets the gazes of the core bridge and command teams, assembled around her and watching her with expectant, ready eyes. She’s spent the last half-decade working towards her own command, but seeing the Shenzhou’s crew wait for her orders makes her feel like she’s eleven again, with no home to her name, newly landed on a planet where her lungs labored to breathe, small and clawless and inconceivably afraid for her life to come. “Doctor Nambue,” she starts, keeping her voice steady by sheer force of habit, “what are the risks for the rest of the away team, given Captain Georgiou’s illness?”

"Negligible, Commander," Nambue answers with a shake of their head. "Talgid's isn't contagious. It's caused by individual reactions to sulfur levels interacting with usually harmless bacteria in the EVA air filtration systems, and it flares up fast. Anyone who might develop the symptoms would have shown signs of it by now."

"Is there any chance of the captain's condition deteriorating suddenly between now and tomorrow?"

"I can't say, sir." Nambue's brow is furrowed as they look into the middle distance, flicking the end of a stylus with their forefinger. "The sooner Captain Georgiou can receive treatment, the better her chances of survival are; that's for certain. The symptoms’ severity can fluctuate dramatically—someone with the condition can seem fine one day and then the next they’re feverish and slipping in and out of consciousness. It's easily cured, if caught in time; the majority of cases are fatal because they go untreated. Usually because it develops in circumstances where medical facilities are not easily accessible."

"I see," Michael says. She doesn't like the phrase _textbook case_. She never has. It's reductive. It's dismissive. The cosmos is dazzlingly complex, disruptive to patterns and capricious towards archetypes, and it makes her suddenly, uselessly furious, the thought of her captain in all her intricacy being reduced to a textbook case of a disease that was spawned when sentient life had the gumption to travel faster than light but not the foresight to clean out their air filters. "Thank you, Doctor." 

Michael looks around at the crew again, at the readiness on their faces. "I don't think—" she starts. Her throat clicks as she tries to swallow. "I don't think we have a choice. Given—the current circumstances—our only reasonable option is likely to wait until the extraction time tomorrow."

Detmer’s head snaps up. “But—Commander—”

“Do you have a viable alternative, Lieutenant?”

“I—no, sir.” Detmer bites at the edge of her mouth. She hesitates and then says in a rush, “But shouldn’t we still try?”

Yes. Yes, they should always try, because the logic of life dictates its inherent value—but logic is also a force of quantification, of empirical judgements and adherence to fact, and Philippa is one woman while their ship is a ship of hundreds. Michael takes a deep breath, measuring her inhale and her exhale. Her lungs gain no relief from it. Logic has no care for the hyperbole of sentiment. 

“Our only viable option is to wait until the extraction time tomorrow,” she repeats firmly, and Detmer slowly nods and lowers her eyes to the table.

“I'm with Commander Burnham,” Vo says, her syllables short and terse. “We’ll keep looking for a solution over the next 24 hours to bring the team back before the estimated window, but it’s looking like we’ll have to wait it out.”

Michael sees the disappointment warring with the worry on Detmer's face, and she feels cold all over. They're Starfleet, the Federation's brightest and best and most reckless. There's always a last-minute innovation, an eleventh-hour plan, something brilliant to save the day, straight out of a holofilm—and now, when her whole world is on the verge of giving, they have nothing.

It is only logical. They are contained by basic probability and physical law, by the bounds of sentient endeavor. Logic dictates that there can be no miracles.

"Gant, send directions to the core personnel of the evening and night bridge shifts," Michael orders. She is achingly aware of how they all snap to attention as she speaks, as they do for Philippa when crisis strikes. "Tell them that the situation on-planet has escalated. The rest of the crew can stay on a short leave schedule."

"Aye, sir."

"Januzzi, keep the comms on frequency with the away team's and divert all other messages to non-priority channels. Alert me of any developments from the surface "

"Copied, Commander."

"Saru, Vo, keep monitoring the solar storm and refining the calibration on the transporters. If there is a chance of a window opening any time sooner, inform me immediately."

Vo nods. "Right on, Burnham."

"If I may interject—" Saru clears his throat. "I would also suggest monitoring on-surface turbulence. The chances of it interfering with the transporters are low, but we should still be prepared for anything that—"

"Whatever you deem necessary, Commander," Michael says. She lets her eyes focus on a tiny stain in the synthwood of the table for a moment before looking back up at the crew. "You are all dismissed."

They file out one by one, quieter than they were when they came in. Michael stays seated, her hands still clasped tightly on the table in front of her.

Vo and Detmer are the last to linger in the room, gathering their PADDs and display chips with determined slowness. The commander glances over at Michael before she starts to head to the door. "Do you want to help with transporter recalibration, Burnham?" she asks. "I could use your steady hands."

"No, Commander." Michael forces her hands to relax. Her fingers tingle and shake ever so slightly. "I need to update García on the situation."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

"Commander—" Detmer begins. She looks pained, working her jaw in silence for a few moments before continuing, "I just—are you going to be okay? After everything that—"

"I am adequate, Lieutenant, and the state of my wellbeing is none of your concern." Michael cannot meet her eyes. "You are free to go."

"Michael—"

"Dismissed, Lieutenant."

She has trained for a decade and a half to separate her voice from her heart, but her words are still too loud in the fragile stillness of the room. Vo claps Detmer on the shoulder and gently leads her from the conference room, and Michael closes her eyes and counts her breaths one by one. 

\-----

After the attacks at her school, Michael found herself waking up in the middle of the night, unable to return to dreaming. It was like she had returned to her first weeks on-planet, when her body was still acclimating to the length of the Vulcan day. She often jolted awake then, sure that it was morning and unable to understand why it was still dark, and when she remembered where she was and why she was, she went to her window and looked out at the mountains in the gloom, weeping while she was sure no one was watching. She retraced her steps now, crossing over to the windows and staring into the gloom, and though she was now too aware of her precarious belonging, too much of a spectator of her own motions to allow herself to weep, she stood against the sky and felt it seep out of her lungs, tar-thick grief and shame at her own futility, her own inadequacy in the face of all the misfortune she brought with her.

When would she be enough? When would she be enough to save them? When would she be enough to deserve a home? And why—why were the nights here longer than any days she could remember?

Logic dictates that planets turn, that daylight is a constant from a central star. She would stand there until dawn broke and her father and mother and brothers began to make sounds in the rooms below. When it was fully day, she turned back to her house, and the space beneath her ribs felt no heavier then, but no lighter.

\-----

"Burnham, I hope there's a good reason you're calling me at this hour of—"

“Have you read your comm messages?”

“What? No, it’s the middle of the goddamn night for me—”

“I need to speak with you. In the ready room."

There's a spare moment of silence, and then García says, "I'll come right down."

Their picture still sits at the corner of Philippa’s desk, between the pot of orchids and the philodendron on its little tripod. The plants are still lush, verdant, lively. There hasn’t been enough time for dust to accumulate on their static smiles. There hasn’t been enough time for the plants to wilt. It’s only been three days. There hasn’t been enough time for the world to change—the Shenzhou still rumbles like a discontent mountain, generating enough gravity and oxygen to sustain hundreds of lives, and Cygni IV still spins and shimmers, caught in the force of its star. The cosmos remains the same, leaving Michael alone to brace for a vast emptiness she cannot comprehend, no matter how many times she has been forced to bear it.

She looks up when Commander García barrels through the door, her uniform jacket half-unzipped over her pyjama shirt. "What happened, Michael? Why did you—"

"It's Talgid's."

García stills. "What?"

"It's Philippa—the captain." Michael crosses her arms tightly, burrowing her cold fingers into the creases of her elbows. "The captain has Talgid's."

The commander is silent. “No,” she manages, shaking her head jerkily. “No, she—she can’t have Talgid’s—”

“She does. Giddens and Kyriakou—they’re two of the ensigns on the away team; they were bored from being trapped in the stasis field. Kyriakou had her medical tricorder with her, and she and Giddens were just—playing around. Looking through the settings for scans designed to detect rare exoterran conditions. They activated the program for Talgid’s and—the captain’s presence immediately pulled the program into high alert.”

The ensigns had been distraught when they came to the comm to speak. _We were just messing around, Commander,_ Kyriakou said. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. _Tyra wanted to see how the medical model was different from hers, and I'd just gotten this one, so I haven't really gotten the chance to tinker with it. We were fooling with the exo settings and—and then it just went wild, and pinging all of these biometric alerts I've never even seen before, and it was the captain setting all of them off—I'm sorry, Commander, we're so sorry—_

Once, Michael would have considered it a triumph, how her reputation was so unyielding that her subordinates thought enough of her to respect her judgement. It now strikes her as a hollow victory, that two ensigns were sure that they would be censured for minor misuse of ‘Fleet equipment while they were stranded in a lethal desert with a sick officer—

—or did they think that she was so far removed from logic that she would blame them?

“Thank God for ensigns and their itchy fingers,” García mutters, rubbing at her forehead. She drops down into the chair in front of Philippa’s desk. “Jesus, Michael. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize to me,” Michael says. She sounds stiff, even to herself. The commander should know better than to expect anything else from her. “The captain’s condition is one that impacts the functioning of this entire ship.”

García looks at her with soft eyes, and Michael turns her head away, torn between anger and a desperate gratitude. She doesn’t say anything more. 

“It's okay, Burnham,” the commander tells her gently. “I hear you. Just tell me what you need. Tell me what to do.”

“You—” Michael swallows hard, shaking her head to clear the ringing of blood in her ears. “I need you to be ready to assume the position of first officer. Should the circumstances call for it.” She can barely say the words. She knows the numbers, knows the cold facts of probability, and still cannot comprehend the possibility of having to live them.

“Of course,” García answers immediately. "Do you—"

She pauses between one word and another. Michael surveys the curving greenery of Philippa's plants, the soft slopes of their leaves and petals. The silence stretches out between them before the commander finally continues, "Do you want any help covering your shifts at the helm? I think your bridge crew—they would all understand if you take some time."

The ringing in Michael's ears flares again, tinny and piercing. "If you have doubts about my ability to perform given preexisting relationships, you can ask Dr. Nambue to declare me compromised and incapable of command—"

"No—Michael—dammit, I'm not trying to call compromise of duty on you or anything, I'm asking you if you need time to process. If you need space—"

"I am capable of functioning as I am," Michael says. It is a triumph that the grit in her throat does not escape into her words.

García pauses for a long moment before nodding. "Okay, Burnham," she repeats. She sounds softer than she did before, and there is a part of Michael that wants to rail against her for her pity. 

She rises to leave, and then turns back. "For what it's worth, Commander, none of us would report you for compromise of duty. We wouldn't think any less of you for grieving."

The doors slide open soundlessly to let García depart, and Michael sits alone, her fingers grasping uselessly at the empty air, searching for something to hold.

\-----

What is the use of her decades on Vulcan if she cannot bear this with grace? What is the use of logic if it cannot temper this senseless rage? All she can do is think of Philippa—Philippa in all her brightness, her Philippa, who introduced her to soapy holovids and ate cold French toast for dinner, who reminded her of the joy of laughing in open spaces, who was sometimes angry and sometimes selfless and too often proud, who made her tea when she couldn't sleep and held her when she was too prideful to weep in front of herself, who taught her about cheating at cards and running a starship and swimming in the open sea—

—now helpless. Now choking on the air meant to save her, stranded and sick and so far away, and on the verge—of being no longer. 

She cannot say the word out loud. She cannot even form it in the privacy of her mind. Philippa is the captain on a ship of hundreds of lives, each of whom would be affected by her death, all of whom are looking to Michael for leadership, yet Michael's world has narrowed to a greedy pinpoint: herself and her lover, her pain and her lover's pain. 

The beating of her heart demands personification—it mourns, screams in looping rounds. Her fear is a thundering thing, geologic, dropping stones into the pit of her gut and flooding her throat with bile. She cannot breathe. Her lungs are paper, grotesque and dry and painful in her chest, and she wants to scrabble at the skin of sternum and rip them out by the handful. She despises lungs now. She despises the fallible mechanisms of flesh and blood. She cannot think beyond her phantom hurt. 

It's true, what her father once told her. Grief is a selfish beast.

\-----

“Commander—may we?” Detmer asks in a quiet voice, pointing at the empty seats at her lunch table. Michael blinks at her for a moment before belatedly nodding.

Detmer, Owosekun, and Alyas file around Michael's table and sit down. They pick up their utensils and begin to eat, forks and spoons grating against the surface of ceramic plates. Michael chews on the food in her mouth. Commander Vo had commed her at 1100 hours, asking her if she wanted to eat lunch early with the engineering crew. Michael politely refused her offer. Saru did the same at 1213, striding into the ready room and telling her that the captain would not want her to wallow. She wanted to berate him for treating her like a child, but that would only prove his point, so she looked up from the requisition forms she was filling out and told him in her politest voice that she was currently occupied and would eat after she finished.

The message from Nambue came at 1445, officially flagged as a communique from the chief medical officer. She set her PADD aside with the quietest _clack_ she could manage and went to the dining hall without responding. The entire medical wing could look through her replicator access for confirmation at their own leisure.

What do they want her to do—to carry on with the rhythm of her day without pause, as if she were as unquestionably Vulcan as she tried to be? to break into fragments and plead for comfort and reassurance, as if reassurance has any more worth than dust in the wind?

“We should have known,” Detmer declares abruptly. “She was coughing like wild in the check-in on the second day, but we were all—I—it’s the captain,” the lieutenant manages after a long pause. She picks at her chicken with her fork. Her words come disjointed, distressed. “Captain Georgiou. She—I guess we all just assumed that she wouldn’t get sick. That she can’t get sick. Because—she’s the captain.” Detmer looks up from her plate. “But you knew. Right, Commander?”

Michael nods. She takes a measured bite of her sandwich. It tastes the same as it always does. It tastes like sand, like rust. She swallows the bite and takes another. 

That is the price of connection, of intimacy—the loss of any illusion of invulnerability. Michael can no longer see Philippa as the captain on the Academy posters, the captain in the holofilms. She is infinitely vaster than a story. She can only ever be flesh and blood.

“We want to help, Commander,” Alyas breaks the silence. She pushes pieces of pineapple around her half-eaten bowl of fruit salad. “If you need anything—”

The lieutenant’s words peter out to an uncertain silence, as if she had run out of words to say. Michael mechanically finishes her sandwich, and then her plate of mozzarella and basil, and then her final two sips of tea. She can hear the lieutenants shift in their chairs, their clothing rustling as they glance at each other. 

“I am functioning adequately,” Michael finally says. Her voice is flat, more stilted than the quiet that preceded it.

Owosekun fidgets with her fork, tapping the tines against the edge of her plate. “We know, Commander.” 

There is a sudden loud _clank_ as Detmer shoves her tray of food aside. “Dammit, sir, we just want to know you’re okay,” she bursts out. “You—we love her, you know, but you love her so damn much, and if I had to go get a good cry in before we went to the conference room—I can't even imagine how you're feeling now. You could’ve told us to go save her. We would have all done it, you know?"

Michael freezes—at the thought of exposure, the implicit accusation of failure, or the irreverent invocation of feeling, she does not know. 

Detmer rushes on. "We're—we're Starfleet, Commander," she says. "We would've gone out to the bridge and split-warped down to the surface without hesitation, if you'd given us permission. I wanted to do it—for her. For you. We're Starfleet," she repeats, and she sounds impossibly earnest, the way Philippa does when she talks about stars and wonder. "We signed up for this. We're supposed to do impossible things. We're supposed to defy the odds for the people we care about, and fight until the last—"

"No."

The sound being dragged from Michael's throat is barely a word. “I promised to keep you safe,” she bites out. "I swore to Starfleet to maintain this ship in the absence of her captain. I swore to her—I promised her I would take care of you. I swore to hold my duty above any _love_—" she nearly spits the word, half-afraid that it would stick in her throat and refuse to become sound, "—and I swore that oath gladly, and I will not break my word, Lieutenant." Her ribs are aching, her breath coming too hard for her half-level tone. "I will not. Not now. Not ever. Certainly not because of what you think Starfleet is supposed to do."

She picks up her empty plates with trembling fingers and leaves the table. Detmer lets her go without saying anything more. 


	6. The Sound of the Wind

The call comes at 0256 Standard hours.

Michael has been working on requisition forms at the desk in their quarters since the nightly check-in call ended at 2103. The chamomile tea she replicated at 2215 for herself from sheer force of habit sits at her elbow, cold to the touch. Every time she looks up from her PADD, she sees their bed, one side of it still a little messy, and she knows that if she pressed her face to the pillow, she’d still be able to smell her sweet coconut shampoo and her hair. She doesn’t know how much longer it’ll linger. Their sheets are changed once a week.

“_Commander Burnham?_” García’s words grate against the silence. 

Michael’s throat clicks as she swallows. “Report.”

“_The storm—Fan and I tried to patch the signal through to your handheld, but it’s not strong enough._ _She’s gotten worse, Burnham. A lot worse._” García lets out a juddery sigh. “_She’s asking for you._”

Their sheets are still crinkled from where she folded them before the mission. Their replicator is still programmed to make her cup of jasmine tea after Michael’s chamomile. Michael distantly registers Commander García calling her name and wonders how long she has been silent.

“I will come down,” Michael hears herself saying. Her hand lowers the comm from her ear and ends the call with a metallic _click_.

She is faintly glad that she folds all of her clothes before she puts them in the hamper—her trousers and shirt from the day are easily donned, her jacket creaseless where it hangs from the spare chair in the room. She zips the jacket all the way up to her throat. Her eyes keep trailing back to their bed. She wants to be a child again, naïve enough to believe that if she crawled beneath her blanket and closed her eyes, everything would fade away.

There are four corridors and three stories traversable by the second station turbolift separating the senior officers’ quarters from the main bridge. Michael counts every step there, as she was taught to number the settlements on Mars, the miles to Babylon. When the double doors part for her, the first thing she can hear is the wind rustling through the comms, furious static.

García is pacing around the bridge, weaving between the stations occupied by the rest of the night shift’s crew. She looks back at the whirr of the doors when Michael steps through and nods at her before turning back to the viewscreen. They are all silent save for the wind. Michael takes one small step forward, and then another. Cygni IV looms in her eyes with its roiling gold.

“Captain?” she whispers, the word cracking in two.

“_Michael_,” Philippa's voice comes, and Michael starts at the shaky sound, so weak and hoarse she had to strain to hear it above the storm. “I_ wouldn’t—have blamed you—_” Philippa coughs, and it seems to shake her, wrack her frame, “_—if you had been sleeping by now—_”

“No.” The word tumbles from Michael's lips, loud as phaser blast in the still quiet of the bridge. “No. No—Captain, please—”

“_Not Captain._” Philippa breaks off to cough again, and she sounds hoarser than she did just seconds ago, her words less cohered. “_I would dearly like it—if you called me Philippa one more time._”

Not now. Not with their bed so close. Not while her tea is still on their bedside table. “Philippa,” Michael exhales in a rush of air, and it is a prayer and a refusal and a sound much like a scream all at once, and the heads of the crew whip around to look at her and then turn away just as quickly, shying from the spectacle of her grief. “You don't have to do that yet, Philippa. Not now. When you come back—" she sounds like she's pleading for someone—her captain, herself, the heedless wind—to believe her, "—when you come back, I will address you with your name as many times as you want. In front of the morning bridge crew."

There is a noise that might be a laugh, followed by a loud, hacking cough that makes Michael flinch. She can just make out Ensign Kyriakou's worried murmurs in the lull that follows, and the beeps of a tricorder in overdrive. 

"_A bold promise, Number One_," Philippa replies at last, and she sounds like she had swallowed sand.

"You need to rest your voice," Michael says thinly. "You should—you need to rest, Philippa, there are only fourteen hours left before your extraction—"

"_That might be—more hours than I can fit onto my schedule now—_"

"No." Michael shakes her head, the corners of her eyes hot and prickling.

"_—and I don't want—to rest—_"

"No, you must, Philippa—you must—"

"_—when I could be talking to you._"

There are sounds inchoate in Michael's throat, and she hunches over from the force of them and presses her hands over her mouth to keep them from escaping.

"_Commander?_" Kyriakou's voice is thick, like she had been crying. "_I—this—I don't know how long she—she—it could be more than the fourteen hours we need, it could be an hour from now, but—you—she's right, Commander. She’s right—_"

The ensign breaks off, and Michael tries to form words as the sound of the wind howls around them. "Philippa," is all she can muster. "_Philippa_." Words are futile for what she wants to say.

"_I'm here, Michael_."

“I’m here, too. I’m right here, Philippa.” The hot prickling in Michael’s eyes threatens to spill over, and she brushes the moisture away before it can run. The doors to the bridge hiss open behind her, admitting careful footsteps, and the shadows of people appear around her, but she pays them no heed. Her eyes cannot leave the viewscreen. "Is it beautiful there?" she asks. It feels like dragging the words from her throat, from her lining of her lungs. "Is the storm still beautiful?"

“_So beautiful_,” Philippa tells her, and Michael swallows down her cry at the wonder in her voice—that there still can be wonder, clear as ringing day through the static-filled transmission and hoarseness and the pain and the endless wind. “_The sun is just now—setting. Everything is red and gold. Like fire. I can see—the shadows—of the mountains, on the sand. Right as the sun passes over._” She takes a rattling breath. “_I—don’t mind, Michael. Not at all. But I do wish I could see—the stars again. And you._”

Her legs give. Her feet stagger backwards until her spine hits a wall, and she leans there, locking her knees to keep from falling down. Hands reach for her, and she blinks as concerned faces resolve themselves above hers—Commander Saru, Lieutenant Detmer, Lieutenant Owosekun. She flinches away from their touch.

“I’m right here, Philippa,” Michael repeats, the best she can. The sound of the words cannot be separated from the hitching in her breath. “I’ll always be here for you.”

“_No. Promise me. Not always, my love. Take care of our ship._ _Take care of yourself._”

“I promise, I love you, Philippa, I promise—”

There are some promises she cannot make and some promises she must, and for the first and only time, they are one and the same.

“_I took some pictures for you_.” Philippa’s broken voice fights to rise above the wind, and Michael struggles to understand it. “_I think—I think you will like them, there’s something about—the mountains here—the light in them—_”

She waits, and waits, but there is no sound outside of the white roar of the storm. “Philippa? Are you there?” she asks. She can barely recognize the high, plaintive words as her own. 

There is no response. “Philippa?” she asks again.

The comm is quiet.

“Tell me about them,” Michael begs. “Tell me again about the mountains, Philippa. Tell me again about the sky.”

All she can hear beyond her own desperate words is the storm, the cold whirr of wind and sand. 

Michael buries her face in her hands and feels the wetness seeping between her fingers and falling to the floor unchecked. She presses her palms to her eyes, trying to stem the tears, but they refuse to stop. Her lips form words, but the strength to speak them cannot come. It has been so long since she last cried that she's forgotten how to breathe while crying.

She stops counting the seconds, stops numbering. She doesn’t know how long she stands there until she becomes aware of familiar voices calling her name—once, twice, more, urgent. She lifts her head from her wet hands to blink up at Saru and Owosekun, who look down at her like they're afraid, or pitying. "You should be sleeping," she rasps. She clears her throat, but the tear-thickness clings to her tongue. "The morning shift is in—" she tries and fails to reckon with the hours, "—the morning shift is soon."

Saru’s shoes tap softly against the floor as he moves closer. She wants him to go away. She wants him to click his tongue and tell her to stop crying. To tell her that she should be stronger, colder, prouder. To admonish her for showing so much of her heart. 

“We are here for you, Michael,” is instead what he says, and Michael wants to scream at him for his display of kindness.

Detmer steps out from behind Owosekun, pale-faced, cheeks damp, and she reaches out and asks, "Let us help, Commander? Please?" 

Her voice trembles, but her hand is steady, and Michael stares at it in befuddlement. She takes a shuddering breath, and then another, and Detmer's hand is still outstretched, her eyes open and pained, and the way the lieutenant said her title was warmer than the way others have said her name, and she looks to Saru and Owosekun and sees—

—no fear, no pity on their faces, only concern, she realizes, the refracted kindness she had heard in Saru's words, and she turns back to Detmer and her outstretched hand and nods without understanding what she had agreed to, unable to comprehend such tenderness in the face of her slow dissolution but craving comprehension nonetheless, and Detmer's arms are suddenly around her, holding tight, her hands warm on her back, tracing soothing circles on the fabric of her uniform.

When Michael crumples, three sets of hands catch her.

From very far away, the noises of the away team swell and swarm like the calling of cicadas in the few days of summer they have in the sun, and she dimly registers their overlapping words as they filter through the blur of the world around her—Giddens rifling through the emergency medkit and calling out the names of the hypos, _epinephrine? dimenhydrinate? albuterol? do any of these do anything?_ and Kyriakou shouting out her tricorder readings,_ her pulse’s stabilized, oxygen intake back up to forty-five percent of normal levels_ and Narwani rushing to half-scream into the comm, _she fell unconscious but we got a pulse, she’s still alive, Commander, she’s still alive_—

“_—we just—we just wait,_” she hears Kyriakou say. “_I can’t do anything. We can’t do anything. We have to—we wait—_”

García acknowledges the message. Michael sinks to the floor, and they go with her—Detmer on one side, Owosekun on the other, Saru crouched in front of them. They're all close enough to touch her if she wished it but distant enough so she can still try to breathe, and with a small and sudden surge of courage she reaches out and squeezes the lieutenants' hands tightly before curling back into herself, hiding her face from view.

The wall is cold through her uniform jacket, the floor ungiving. Ensign Fan asks in an uncertain voice if they would like to sit at her station, and she shakes her head wordlessly. Owosekun replies for her. She refuses the tea that Saru suggests he might go replicate and García's offer of the captain's chair. 

The minutes tick on with only the insensate wind to mark them. 

"There was this one time—" 

Detmer's voice is shaky and soft and somehow too loud after the stillness, and she breaks off to clear her throat before starting again. "There was this one time, Joann and I were visiting her family on Beta Centauri. Have we told you this story before, Commander?"

Yes. At least twice. Once over dinner the day they returned from shore leave. Once again while tipsy during a holiday party. "You can tell me again," Michael whispers.

Even though she does not look up from the crook of her arms, Detmer still hears her. She continues, "It was—like stepping back in time. I thought we'd accidentally jumped into a temporal displacement when we first landed. The planet looks like the pictures of Earth, before the bioscaffolding for forest regeneration went up—"

"—way before that, even," Owosekun adds. Her voice becomes steadier the more she speaks, moving along to the rhythm of a familiar story. "Everything in town was copied from pre-industrial tech, except for the offworld transporters and comms tech, and those’re stuck in the middle of the forest so no one sees them."

Detmer's words grow to a palpable shadow of her usual diction. "The shuttle point was—two kilometers from the settlement? Maybe three? And I hadn't seen a distance measured in kilometers since my family left Europa when I was ten, Commander; kilometers are nothing. But it took us nearly a standard hour to get to town, in a—what was it, a cart? Drawn by a horse, even."

"Keyla was scared of the horse," Owosekun says, and Detmer makes a noise close to a laugh and protests with a fond, unstudied ease that cannot be erased even by the heaviness in the room.

“It’s just that I’d never seen a horse before, and I’d certainly never sat on a cart driven by a horse. I was surprised.”

“You were surprised by the insects, too.” Owosekun reaches across and lightly nudges Detmer. “Lieutenant Outworlder over here fell out of the cart swatting at a beetle that landed on her.”

“It was the size of a handheld comm.”

“It was a junie bug, kids keep them as pets. I had one.”

“I didn’t set foot in a natural biome until I was twenty-one, you think I’ve seen bugs as big as my hand flying around before?”

Michael doesn’t raise her head from her crossed arms, not yet, but she can see the light at the edges of her vision, creeping through the spaces between the creases of her sleeves. Once, when she was young enough that she couldn’t reach the tops of tables, her mother took her to see a travelling butterfly pavilion, and that was her first time seeing insects outside of her picture books, their bright paper colors and needle legs. She was older when the razor-winged dragonflies on Vulcan buzzed and bit her where she sat in Amanda’s gardens, and older still when she was doused with lavender-scented bug spray because _the mosquitoes’ll eat you alive out here, Number One, with this humidity and how much we’ll sweat, they’ll cling to your skin and have a free-for-all_—

“I—do not like insects,” Michael mutters, and her voice sounds like she has sat in silence for years before speaking.

“Yes! Yes,” Detmer exclaims, too fervently, loud enough to echo. “See, Jo, I told you—bugs are weird if you haven’t grown up around them, they’re weird.” Her sigh is uneven. “I loved it there, though. Even with the insects. Your mother and Claude and your father and Ricky and all your uncles and cousins—your mom is the coolest woman I know. Head of a blacksmith guild. I want to be part of a blacksmith guild. Don’t we all?” 

She keeps talking, through the noise on the comm and the quiet on the bridge. “Jo showed me where she used to work. Their—_mail_ center. It’s right next to the beam-down point, hidden in the middle of the woods, and all the offworld letters and deliveries get dropped in there. They receive all subspace transmissions there, too, and transcribe them onto paper to send out to the people in town. That's why your signature looks so much better than mine, Jo, 'cause you hand-wrote letters as your summer job."

"Your signature is crap because you haven't touched a pencil in your life, Kay."

“Of course I haven't, Mom and Dad raised a PADD-jacking gear rat, visiting you was the first time I’d touched paper—”

They ramble, filling time. Little by little, Michael begins to count the minutes again. 

The ship’s comm stays on all the while, filling the air with the shrieks of the distant wind. Narwani checks in once every half-hour, and her voice is never any less afraid, but never any more. The night crew move around—to pace, to get water, to check their personal comms, jackets rustling, boots squeaking against the floor. Detmer and Owosekun tell her about their visit to Beta Centauri, about the places they saw, both old and new, and when it nears morning, she finally lifts her head to look out at the planet removed beyond her reach and the people who are closer. 

“—night there, her father made rice and peas with lamb, and we helped him pick the onions and chop the ginger and scallions, and they showed me how to use a knife, and—I’ll only say this once, but—” Detmer trails off, shaking her head. “That was the best meal I’ve ever had. The best thing I’ve ever eaten, in my entire life.”

Michael clears her throat until she feels like she can speak into the coming day, and she nudges her elbow against Owosekun’s and says, “Looks like we were right after all, Lieutenant.”

A smile breaks out across Owosekun’s face, disbelieving and full of hope. “Yeah,” she says, her voice breaking. “_Yeah_. Looks like we are.”

The lights on the bridge are programmed to recreate dawn even though the black has no care for the divisions of night and day. They lighten before her, daylight enough to make her eyes ache, and Narwani comes on the comm to say that _she’s awake, Commander, she can’t talk right now but she’s awake, we don’t know how long this’ll last but she’s awake_—

The computer beeps, marking the end of night shift. The crew file out one by one, softly wishing her well as they pass through the door, awkward and ritual and sincere, and Michael wipes at the tacky film on her cheeks, rubbing at the phantom tears between her fingers.

“Commander García?” Michael asks. The commander hurries over as Detmer and Owosekun help her find her balance after she pushes herself to her feet. She needs to rinse her mouth of its wooliness, wash the salt from her eyes so she can face the coming hours.

"What is it, Michael?"

She starts to speak, and finds that her voice is breaking no less, but no more than it was before. “Can you share the conn with me until the extraction point?”


	7. Yet Bear It They Must

She works on forms for most of the day.

The bridge is still, the sort of still that seeps into bones while inky clouds loom over the horizon before a downpour, when the air is thick and smells of strange stone and water, or in the moments when the sea pulls back on the sand before it surges and breaks, sweeping away everything in its path. García sits at her right by the spare ops station, quietly talking with Ensign Rhys. Saru mills about behind her shoulders, muttering about his team’s analysis of the storm. After the morning shift’s lunch break, Detmer and Owosekun come and set a tray of food by her elbow, laden with a basil and tomato sandwich and mozzarella slices and a cup of green tea, and there is a slice of coconut cake as well, a small mountain of sweet frosting and coconut flakes, and she nods at them and eats as much as she is able.

Narwani keeps checking in, numbering the hours. Philippa—

—Philippa slips in and out of consciousness. Her lucid periods are fewer and further in between. Dr. Nambue is present for the check-ins, guiding Ensign Kyriakou through her assessment of the captain’s condition. The prognosis is the same every time: uncertain. They still keep checking.

The amount of paperwork involved in the running of a starship is immense. There are requisition forms for the raw material for the organic and non-organic replicators, the dilithium fuel, the oxygen modules, the plants for the botany labs, the repair materials for engineering, the shampoo and saffron brittle and playing cards and scented candles the crew orders from across the quadrants, hungry for a taste of soil. Itineraries have to be checked, performance reviews written, mission logs certified, requests verified, injuries and findings reported through the correct channels. She sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night to see Philippa sitting up in bed, reading light on, fingers frantically tapping as she checks over the monthly mission report which was due the next day. 

Michael finds it tedious, bureaucratic, and largely useless, but she is still less averse to it than Philippa. Philippa hates paperwork. She slings her arms around Michael’s shoulders and kisses her and promises to bring tea and her favorite chocolate sandwich cookies to her desk whenever Michael volunteers to fill in a couple of the requisition forms or performance reviews, and Michael cups her cheek and says through her grin, _flatterer_, and _stop distracting me if you want to get these done in time, you always leave your paperwork until the last minute_, and _you’re still distracting me, Philippa,_ until she dissolves in laughter and leans into Philippa’s touch.

She cannot conceive of a life among the stars without Philippa. She is in the lights of the bridge which mark the dawn every morning, in the rumpled pillows of their bed, in the signature box of the itineraries they send to HR, in the warp lights which lead them to new places. Philippa, laughing in the captain's chair as Michael and Saru bickered behind her. Tripping over her own feet while waltzing in the gala on Barzan II. Fixing her hair in the mirror in their quarters even though the two of them were alone, staring out their window and drawing private constellations between the stars.

There was a day a month or two ago, when Michael woke up before her alarm. She was an early riser by training, not predilection; she liked to sleep while she could. The clock display said that it was 0641, too late to go back to sleep but still too early. Their quarters were dark, the lights programmed to stay at 15% until they both woke up at 0645 to prepare for the morning shift.

Philippa snuffled and curled closer, chasing Michael's warmth, and Michael propped herself up on her elbow to look down at her—face relaxed and open, strands of hair fluffing out around her head, hands clasped sweetly by her head on the sheets they shared. She watched her sleep until the alarm sounded and their room filled with the closest thing they had to daylight, and watched as her eyes opened to blink hazily.

_Good morning, Number One_, Philippa said, sleep-hoarse and soft, and Michael leaned down to kiss her.

She rested her forehead against Philippa’s when their lips parted, overcome by her skin-warmth, the little crinkle of her nose when she yawned, the way her eyelids fluttered when she first woke up, and Philippa held her close, her fingers lightly carding through the curls at the nape of Michael’s neck.

_Good morning_, she whispered, pressing a kiss to Philippa's cheek, and another to Philippa's smile. She slid out of bed to get dressed, and Philippa caught her hand and kissed her knuckles gently before letting her go, and she wondered if such perfect happiness could exist, that she could spend every morning like this for the rest of her days.

She now has her answer. The logic of the cosmos should never be described as cruel, but for all the beauty within it, theirs is an entropic world. 

\-----

At 1653 Standard hours, the solar storm quiets to a dull crackle of static.

Narwani and Giddens stand by on the comm, the surface wind screaming loud enough to surmount the distance. Vo has opened up the intership broadcast, connecting the bridge with the transporter room, where Nambue is at the ready with a medical team and a gurney for the captain. Michael sits in her chair, flanked by Saru and Alyas and García. Her crew sit at their stations. They wait for the all-clear, breath bated as one.

Alyas raises her head from her PADD at 1653. Her eyes gleam with light reflected from the viewscreen. “The storm’s down,” she announces.

Michael’s throat is tight from things she doesn’t want to name. “Ensigns, are you ready for transport?” she asks.

“_Ready, Commander_,” Narwani calls over the wind.

Michael's mouth is too dry. “Commander Vo, lock their biosignals and beam on my mark.”

_“Aye, Commander.”_ Vo’s voice is steady. _“Searching their biosignals now—and locking—”_

The commander falls silent. 

“Commander?” Michael prompts.

“_I can’t lock onto their biosignals_,” Vo says tightly. “_The transporters are fully operational, the conditions are perfect, the interface is fine, the signal calibration is tuned to the right frequency, I can search and find their locations, but—I just can’t get a lock. Something’s scrambling the signal right before our systems can grab on._”

Michael’s stomach tightens. “Is it radiation turbulence?”

“_It can’t be. Space is clear, surface-level EM is negligible._” The transporter console beeps, faintly audible through the broadcast, and Vo comes back on. “_We’re scanning at the right frequencies for the signal—it’s something else, something blocking us. Jira—_” the commander calls, raising her voice, “c_an you hear me? I need you to look for anything on your end that might be messing with the signal, some kind of scrambler or forcefield._”

There’s a rustling noise as Ensign Narwani picks up the comm. “_I don’t see anything, sir_,” she says, her voice fading in and out as she moves. “_There aren’t any scramblers here, there shouldn’t be anything—_” she trails off. “_There’s just the environmental containment field._”

“_That would do it._” Vo sighs in relief. “_Take down the field on our mark. I’ll run the signal lock program on a loop, it’ll atomize and beam you up the moment you power the field down so there won’t be any risk of exposure._”

“_Copied, Commander._” 

The wind crescendos as Narwani works. Michael waits for one minute, then two, then three. “Ensign?” she asks, glancing around the bridge. The crew looks back at her with expectant eyes. “Have you found the controls?”

There is no response from the surface.

“Ensign?” Michael repeats.

“_Commander Burnham?_” Narwani's voice finally comes, too high, too afraid. “_I—I don’t think I can._”

Michael freezes.

“Can you clarify, Ensign?” García asks after a long silence.

“_I can’t turn the stasis field off, Commander. It’s—we didn’t even turn it on in the first place, it turned itself on, and I’m trying to access the control panel but it’s not letting me get anywhere, I’m locked out—_”

“Do you have any control over the emergency stasis field?” Michael hears herself ask.

“_No_,” Narwani exclaims, “_no, we don’t, Tyra and I are trying, we can't even access basic settings, we can’t do anything except change the colors of the boundary LEDs and—and—switch from manual to verbal commands—_"

"_Jira_," Vo yells across her. "_Listen to me, Jira, it's gonna be alright. Breathe, okay? Just breathe._" She waits until the ensign's hitched breaths even out before continuing, "_Now listen. Switch the module over to verbal instruction, the newer models have a limited AI, it'll just be like talking to the ship's computer. Prompt it to tell you why you can't access the base functions_."

Michael's fingers dig so tightly into the edge of her seat that her nails dent the leather. She strains to hear Narwani's shaky instructions to the module as she sets it to accept verbal commands. 

"_—system I am running, the 10.8.7 beta, was built to safeguard against against accidents and sabotage_," the module announces. "_In environments which are extremely hostile to sentient life, I am programmed to automatically protect my users from all sources of potential harm. So long this sandstorm persists, I will not allow any adjustment of my stasis settings, as dictated—_"

"_New tech, my ass. Goddamn_." Vo is silent for a moment, and then there’s a loud clattering noise from the transporter room. She must have thrown something. "_Goddamn piece of shit_," she screams.

"Commander," Michael says, her voice tight and on the verge of breaking. "What's happening with the signals?"

"_It's a damned—survival AI. Fresh off development. Won't let down the field while the surface-level storms persist. No stasis release, no beaming signal. No beaming signal, no—goddamn—transport—_" she bites out.

"Can you hack it from the ship?" Michael swallows hard, forcing down the frantic noises bubbling from her throat. "EVA equipment syncs with the ship's mainframe every twenty-four hours to log their use, there has to be a connection between the devices you can access—"

“_I can do that, but these units are virtually self-contained, it'll take me at least an hour to get into the interface—how much time do we have, Rhys_?”

Ensign Rhys’ face is drawn and pale. “We have—eight minutes until the solar storm starts up again—”

"Make that seven," Alyas says, flicking though the readouts on her PADD. "I'm so sorry, Commander, the storm is picking up."

"_When's the next window_?" 

Saru shakes his head. “We have no idea when the next lull will occur—”

"_So we just wait?_" Narwani bursts out. "_That's all we can do, we—wait?_" She starts sobbing, suddenly and furiously."_We're just gonna sit here and—and—do nothing? We don't have a shot?_ _The—the next lull in the storm could be days from now—and we're stuck here because of some—some stupid AI while the captain is dying_—"

"_No_."

Michael barely hears Kyriakou and Giddens begging the captain to lie back down and Narwani stuttering out reassurances between her tears. She can calculate the hours since she last heard Philippa speak, but numbers are inadequate to describe their separation, and she bites down hard on her lips to keep from crying out again at the sound of her voice.

"_Computer—_" Philippa starts, and then she coughs, a wet, thick noise, and Michael's chest constricts. "_Repeat again—the purpose of your program_."

"_My program is designed to protect the sentient life within my boundaries against hostile external conditions_."

"_So you would say_—" Philippa coughs again, and Michael sees the rest of the bridge flinch out of the corners of her eyes, a wave of fear surging, "_—that your purpose is—to ensure our survival_. _Is that—correct_?"

"_Affirmative_."

"_I—have Talgid's Syndrome._" Philippa's breathing is heavy and labored. "_The symptoms—have advanced—to loss of consciousness. Do you know—what this means_?"

"_Individuals with Talgid's Syndrome who experience periods of unconsciousness are in the final stage of the disease. In most cases, they do not survive for more than twenty-four hours beyond that point._"

"_You're—a smart one_," Philippa gasps out. "_Given the—the—trajectory—of the storm—_" 

She trails off into weak, wracking coughs. The ensigns on the surface mutter worriedly, their voices blending in with the wind, and behind Michael's back, the bridge crew whisper their fears among themselves, it's final stage Talgid's, she's not lucid anymore, she's lost it, we've lost her, we've lost—

"Put me on speaker," Michael shouts.

The whispering stops. 

"Loud as you can, Ensign. So the module's computer can hear me."

Narwani obeys. Michael closes her eyes for a moment to steady herself, and then she begins.

"Computer," she calls, her voice ringing. "Given the trajectory of the storm, how long will it be until the next projected lull in the turbulence?"

"_The next anticipated lull is in 3.67 days, according to my internal calculations_."

The computer's voice is melodic and even, clearly mechanical. A decade ago, it had been the vogue to make AIs sound as close to organic life as possible; the learning programs on Vulcan sounded like the strict teachers who ran them. Newer programs shy from that uncanny diction, coded with voices like bells and piano keys.

"What are the chances of an individual with final stage Talgid's surviving the 3.67 days?"

The module pauses for a long moment before stating, "_That individual's chances of survival are less than 0.0092 percent_."

Michael nods at the reply. She stares out into the black, eyes fixed on the spinning gold of Cygni IV, its stormy and shining atmosphere. "Is that a violation of the purpose of your program?"

"_My program is designed to protect the sentient life within my boundaries against hostile external conditions. There are other individuals within my boundaries who will still be shielded from the storm—_"

"What is the cumulative probability of survival for all four individuals within your boundaries should they return to their primary vessel immediately, where medical facilities and long term life support are located?"

"_81.4 percent_."

Someone gasps aloud in understanding. She can feel people crowding around her chair—García's firm hand of support on her shoulder, Saru standing close. "There have been attempts to transport these four individuals back to their primary vessel. Why did your systems prevent their transport?

"_My program is designed to protect the sentient life within my boundaries against hostile external conditions. This includes threats of sabotage, wherein individuals are at risk of being intentionally transported from my stasis field into dangerous and potentially fatal situations."_

"Calculate the chances that this is an attempt at sabotage. That I would go to the trouble of debating your logic to harm the people you protect, while time and your influence are already causing greater harm than I ever will."

The module pauses, and then says, "_Processing request_."

Michael straightens in her chair. She presses on before the module can finish. "Calculate their chances of survival with the transport, even factoring in the probability that this is an attempt at sabotage. Would there not still be a chance that they all would live?"

_“Processing request—”_

"And if there is still a chance of their survival, if there is still a chance that they all might still live—by your own mandate of protection, shouldn't you save them?" 

_“Processing request—”_

Her heart pounds. She has fallen through the years. She is young again, afraid and proud and hopeful beyond words. “So long as their chances of survival are greater with your barrier down than they are within your barrier, logic dictates that you release them.”

_“...processing request…”_

"By the bounds of your program, by the protocol with which you were created, shouldn't you work towards their survival?" Her voice remembers these words too well; there is an imprint of them on her tongue, in her lungs. "Computer—wouldn’t it be logical for you to try and save them?"

The bridge is still. The away team is quiet. The wind itself seems to subside, whispering senselessly in their ears, and Michael counts the seconds, counts the heartbeats which mark time in her ears, and then the computer replies—

"_Affirmative_."

—and she takes a deep breath, the first she has taken in days.

\-----

She went home after she failed the examinations and sat in Amanda's gardens, where the _nah'ru_ vines were in full bloom and clung tenaciously to every surface in sight, and her brother found her there, hands pressed to her eyes to keep from showing how human she was. He asked her why she was crying. She looked down at him, his moon-full cheeks and concerned frown, and she wrapped her arms around him and held him as close as she could, unable to do anything more.

Sarek found them there. Her brother scurried off after greeting him, and he sat down on the vacated spot on the bench. They silently watched the sunset paint the flowers with gold and red, and Michael dug her nails into the bench until her eyes stopped prickling.

It was the closest to an apology she had ever heard from her father.

The next day in class, a girl rushed to fill the empty seat next to her. She flashed Michael a _ta'al_ and introduced herself as T'Sana, and Michael blinked at her in consternation and asked her why she desired that seat.

_Because your logic yesterday was admirable,_ T'Sana said.

Michael was shocked into speaking bluntly. _I was told that it was human._

T'Sana raised her eyebrows. _Why can it not be both?_

\-----

She awakens to a bone-deep ache along the whole of her back, her shoulders protesting when she tries to move them. Her legs are numb. She slowly straightens up, and the whole of her spine protests in a chorus of cracks.

"Good morning, Number One."

"_Philippa_," she breathes, tumbling out of her chair. She rushes over to the bed in the room, unmindful of the pins and needles in her feet. "You're awake, Philippa—"

"That I am, Michael." Philippa's voice is weak, her face ashen and wan, but she reaches up to catch Michael's hand and laces their fingers together, holding on tightly, and Michael feels a smile break across her face even as her knees give out from under her.

"You're awake," she repeats in a muffled voice, her face pressed to Philippa's hospital gown.

"Nambue was planning on waking you up when I first came to, but I talked them out of it." Philippa's free hand comes up to stroke Michael's hair, and Michael can feel it when she speaks, the timber of her voice. "Those chairs aren't meant for sleeping, you know. You have to be mighty tired to fall asleep in one."

Michael shakes her head. "Did you really expect me to go to sleep in our quarters after all that?"

Philippa sighs. Her hand comes to rest on Michael's shoulder. "How many requisition forms did you do while I was gone, my love?"

"You—likely will not have to do paperwork for the next month or so." She tries to burrow deeper into the round of Philippa’s shoulder. "I also wrote out commendations for Narwani, Giddens, and Kyriakou. You'll have to sign those, if you see fit."

"They certainly deserve it, with the hell they went through on-planet. Tyra especially—this was her first mission." Philippa tugs on Michael's shirt. "Come up here, Number One."

Michael slowly levers herself back up to her feet, and Philippa inches to one side of the bed so Michael can lie down next to her. The pillows and sheets smell like antiseptic disinfectant. Michael cannot bring herself to care. She curls around Philippa and nestles her head into the curve of her neck, counting her every heartbeat like they are stars in a section of the uncharted sky, precious and unexplored. Is this what it means, to treasure a moment? The word too static, too neat—she is voracious for time, consuming their seconds together with too much hunger, numbering them beyond the dispassionate greed required for gold or silver. They are no jewels in treasuries, no coins to be kept; the burn of the past is still too recent, and Michael thinks of other metaphors—of consumption, of voraciousness, of life.

"You were brilliant," Michael tells her. "Arguing against the computer like that."

"I was thinking of the stories you told me about Vulcan, and the sandstorms, and how you talked a computer into seeing the logic of saving people.” Philippa's hand rests on the small of her back, her thumb stroking lightly back and forth. “I remembered you. And I thought—if there is any of that logic in this universe, I would get to see you again. If there is any logic in the world, we would get more time."

Michael laughs, caught between fondness and the bitter aftertaste of fear, and she holds Philippa tighter and mutters into her neck, "That is not logic, you know."

It is the basest sentimentality, the most profound, and she can feel Philippa smiling into her hair as she counters, "It made me argue. It made you join in. It made me come back, in the end. Whatever reasoning it was, it worked."

Michael cannot debate that point.

Philippa runs her hand along Michael's back, tracing the indentations of her ribs. "We will tell stories of this one day," she murmurs into her ear, sweet and sleepy. "Cygni IV, with its clouds of gold."

Michael's hand tightens where it rests on Philippa's side. "I do not think I will," she says fiercely. "I do not think I can."

"But you must. How else can you bear remembering?” Philippa’s honey eyes are sober, and Michael hears the echo of all their promises. “And bear it you must, Michael."

Michael shudders and knots her fingers into the fabric of Philippa’s gown, content to lie there and listen to her breathe for long and quiet moments. Philippa lives. How can such a joy be couched in terms of bearing, of burden?

Yet bear it they must.

"I know," Michael whispers like a confession. “One day, we will tell them.”

The burn of tears is still thick in her throat, her world still a mere pinpoint of light around the woman next to her. Time will dull the sharp pain behind her ribs and temper her hunger, as it has for her after every home she found and lost; the planet that had nearly taken Philippa will become another place where she ate of grief and joy. One day, she will be far enough from fear that she remembers the away team materializing in the transporter room, their bodies coalescing in the golden light; the doctor coming over to where she sits, head buried in her hands, and telling her that Philippa will make it. She will remember falling asleep to the sight of Philippa’s face and waking up to the same.

“We will,” Philippa says, and Michael kisses her, and kisses her again.

It is these things she will tell, when the time comes to tell a story—a full bed, a safe ship, the warmth of Philippa’s hands. It is these things she will remember. The logic of the world has given her this. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank y'all so much for reading! All comments are welcome.
> 
> This fic started off while the show was still airing as several disparate pieces scattered around various apps (the sandstorms on Vulcan, Philippa learning from Michael and arguing with a computer, the description of Barzan) that were cobbled over the course of months into this, whatever this is. I hope y'all don't mind the meandering and circuitous narrative; I have so much respect for people who can write things with real actual plot because keeping this coherent nearly took me out for the count.
> 
> Thank you again to tincanspaceship for the beta and to sciencebluefeelings for the amazing art!


End file.
